Ethan Frome

This audiobook is narrated by a digital voice. In the bleak, snowbound village of Starkfield, Massachusetts, a stranded engineer pieces together the story of Ethan Frome - a poor, taciturn farmer, prematurely aged and lamed by an old accident the townspeople will only half explain. What he reconstructs is a quiet tragedy of thwarted passion: years earlier, the young Ethan, bound to his older, ailing, querulous wife Zeena, fell silently in love with Mattie Silver, the penniless cousin who came to keep their house. When Zeena resolves to send the girl away, Ethan and Mattie face a parting neither can endure. First published in 1911, Ethan Frome is a deliberate departure from Wharton's gilded novels of New York society. Here she turns her moral precision on rural poverty, isolation, and the crushing weight of a hard New England winter, building to one of the most famous and most quietly devastating endings in American fiction. At novella length, it is among her most concentrated and most enduring works - long a staple of the high-school and college classroom. This is the second release in Verbatim's Edith Wharton Audio Library, presenting the canonical and lesser-read works of one of America's foremost novelists in consistent, premium production. Verbatim's Wharton releases are narrated by the same voice, Eleanor Whitaker, creating a continuous listening experience across her catalog.