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Informationen zum Autor Edith Wharton Klappentext A masterwork of American literature from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Age of Innocence. A marked departure from Edith Wharton's usual ironic contemplation of the fashionable New York society to which she belonged, Ethan Frome is a sharply etched portrait of the simple inhabitants of a nineteenth-century New England village. The protagonist, Ethan Frome, is a man tormented by a passionate love for his ailing wife's young cousin. Trapped by the bonds of marriage and the fear of public condemnation, he is ultimately destroyed by that which offers him the greatest chance at happiness. Like The House of Mirth and many of Edith Wharton's other novels, Ethan Frome centers on the power of local convention to smother the growth of the individual. Written with stark simplicity, this powerful and tragic novel has long been considered one of Wharton's greatest works. I. The village lay under two feet of snow, with drifts at thewindy corners. In a sky of iron the points of the Dipper hung like icicles and Orion flashed his cold fires. The moon had set, but the night was sotransparent that the white house-fronts between the elms looked grey against the snow, clumps of bushes made black stains on it, and the basement windows ofthe church sent shafts of yellow light far across the endless undulations. Young Ethan Frome walked at a quick pace along the desertedstreet, past the bank and Michael Eady’s new brick store and Lawyer Varnum’shouse with the two black Norway spruces at the gate. Opposite the Varnum gate,where the road fell away toward the Corbury valley, the church reared its slimwhite steeple and narrow peristyle. As the young man walked toward it the upperwindows drew a black arcade along the side wall of the building, but from thelower openings, on the side where the ground sloped steeply down to the Corburyroad, the light shot its long bars, illuminating many fresh furrows in thetrack leading to the basement door, and showing, under an adjoining shed, aline of sleighs with heavily blanketed horses. The night was perfectly still, and the air so dry and purethat it gave little sensation of cold. The effect produced on Frome was ratherof a complete absence of atmosphere, as though nothing less tenuous than etherintervened between the white earth under his feet and the metallic domeoverhead. ‘It’s like being in an exhausted receiver,’ he thought. Four or five years earlier he had taken a year’s course at a technological college at Worcester, and dabbled in the laboratory with a friendly professor of physics; and the images supplied by that experience still cropped up, at unexpectedmoments, through the totally different associations of thought in which he hadsince been living. His father’s death, and the misfortunes following it, had put a premature end to Ethan’s studies; but though they had not gone far enoughto be of much practical use they had fed his fancy and made him aware of hugecloudy meanings behind the daily face of things. As he strode along through the snow the sense of such meanings glowed in his brain and mingled with the bodily flush produced by his sharptramp. At the end of the village he paused before the darkened front of the church. He stood there a moment, breathing quickly, and looking up and down the street, in which not another figure moved. The pitch of the Corbury road, below lawyer Varnum’s spruces, was the favourite coasting-ground of Stark field, andon clear evenings the church corner rang till late with the shouts of the coasters; but to-night not a sled darkened the whiteness of the long declivity. The hush of midnight lay on the village, and all its wakening life was gatheredbehind the church windows, from which strains of dance-music flowed with thebroad bands of yellow light. The young man, skirting the side of the building, went down the slope toward the basement door...
