Edith Wharton & Ethan Frome

In her long career, which stretched over forty years and included the publication of more than forty books, Edith Wharton (1862-1937) portrayed a fascinating segment of the American experience. She was a born storyteller, whose novels are justly celebrated for their vivid settings, satiric wit, ironic style, and moral seriousness. Her characters, such as Ellen Olenska in The Age of Innocence, Ethan Frome, and the charming but ineffectual Lily Bart in The House of Mirth, are some of the most memorable in American literature. Often portrayed as tragic victims of cruel social conventions, they are trapped in bad relationships or confining circumstances. Her own life stands as an example of the obstacles that a woman of her time and place had to overcome to find self-realization.

Read more about Edith Wharton at Smithsonian...

PDF Update: I've added the most recent hand-outs to the class website. They are downloadable as PDF files, as follows:

Introduction to Edith Wharton & Ethan Frome

Ethan Frome Assignment Sheet
Please note: This PDF is updated to include the data sheet due date, March 29 -- the same day as the final test on the Ethan Frome unit. You can still download the PDF and Word versions of the data sheet (see below). I will also make some more hard-copies available in the room

Data sheet in PDF

Date sheet in (DOC) Word