This book contains Edith Wharton's short novels Ethan Frome and Summer, with notes and commentaries.

I was a little disappointed with this one because I really liked Age of Innocence. Ethan Frome was a better story than Summer I thought too. Found Summer a little slow. I still like Wharton's writing though.

Wharton is more well known for her writings about NYC than New England. Both of these stories are in Massachusetts, so it makes sense why this edition puts them together. I like how descriptive she is of MA. Even though I live in New England, I still prefer her NYC novels I guess. ( )

Reviewing these two one at a time, here are my thoughts about Ethan Frome, followed by Summer:

The Constable Edith Wharton edition that I've just read contains both Ethan Frome and Summer, but I am reviewing them separately because whether or not Edith Wharton considered them 'inseparable' as claimed in the default description at Goodreads, they were published six years apart in 1911 and 1917 respectively; one is a short story and the other is a novella; and I read them separately too, with other books in between. Both are included in 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, along with The House of Mirth (1905), Bunner Sisters (1916), The Age of Innocence (1920, which won the Pulitzer Prize), and Glimpses of the Moon (1922, see my review).

The Reef, however, isn't included in 1001 Books, and I wasn't surprised to find that in the Introduction to this edition, Michael Millgate says that although Henry James admired it (no doubt because it is the most Jamesian of Wharton's works), later critics have commonly been less certain of the quality of The Reef. It seems they have the same reservations as I do that the exploration of the central situation only succeeds in inflating it beyond all reasonable proportion. i.e. Anna Leath making a mountain out of a premarital molehill, but see my review for how I came round to the view that the novel is really about trust not sexual propriety.

Michael Millgate's Introduction to this edition of Ethan Frome and Summer really is excellent. Written for this 1965 edition, it predates a biography of Wharton, so its 23 pages include biographical details about her childhood, her unfortunate marriage and divorce, her life in France including her war service, and a good discussion of not only Ethan Frome and Summer but also her other works as well. Speculating before the availability of her private papers in the Yale Library, which were embargoed till 1968, he writes:

It is a familiar and curious point of speculation whether the inadequacy, in one way or another, of the men in Edith Wharton's life can be said to have influenced the presentation of her fictional heroes. Certainly the heroes are all, in the final analysis, less than heroic, unable to confront with sufficient strength or resolution the demands of the situations in which they find themselves, incapable of meeting the needs of the women who depend on them. (Introduction, p. 15)

Well, presumably there is an authoritative bio by now, and perhaps someone who's read it, can answer that question!

Anyway...

Ethan Frome is (as 1001 Books says) about sexual frustration and moral despair. Like Summer, it's set in a turn-of-the-century New England farming community, or what we might less charitably call the backblocks i.e. impoverished rural communities characterised by limited opportunity and populated by people with little education or wider experience of the world. The reader is introduced to Ethan Frome in the Prologue by an un-named stranger to the town, whose compassionate gaze reveals Ethan to be aged beyond his years, and crippled since a 'smash-up'. This narrator, alerting us to the small canvas of the township, learns the story from various informants though most of the dwellers in Starkfield, as in more notable communities, had had troubles of their own to make them comparatively indifferent to those of their neighbours. Wharton makes it clear from the outset that this is no romanticised pioneer community; although nearly all the characters are long-term residents born and bred there, social isolation adds profound loneliness to the troubles of these people.

To read the rest of my review of Ethan Frome, please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2019/11/24/ethan-frome-in-ethan-frome-and-summer-by-edi...

Summer fits nicely into Novellas in November and I'll be adding it to my Twitter feed with #NovNov.

As the excellent Introduction by Michael Millgate tells us, Summer and Ethan Frome are both set in the moribund back blocks of New England, apparently part of Edith Wharton's purpose deliberately to challenge the established literary image of the New England countryside, and he quotes from her autobiography A Backward Glance:

For years I had wanted to draw life as it really was in the derelict mountain villages of New England, a life even in my time, and a thousandfold more a generation earlier, utterly unlike that seen through the rose-coloured spectacles of my predecessors, Mary Wilkins and Sarah Orne Jewett. In those days the snow-bound villages of Western Massachusetts were still grim places, morally and physically: insanity, incest and slow mental and moral starvation were hidden away behind the paintless wooden house-fronts of the long village streets, or in the isolated farmhouses on the neighbouring hills; and Emily Brontë would have found as savage tragedies in our remoter valleys as on her Yorkshire moors. (Introduction, p.13)

What Millgate doesn't explain is how the wealthy and fashionable wife of a conventional man came to know this. Yes, Wharton got her hands dirty in her voluntary work during WW1, but that was literally a world away from the setting of this novella. What on earth could she have known about life as it really was? Who, living that life, was going to tell this rich, elegant stranger about it? Was it what's called 'common knowledge'? or not spoken about because it conflicted with America's view of itself? or was it demonising of poor and disadvantaged people, what we might call 'othering' today? I couldn't find anything specific about the mountain people of New England, but I found in a Wikipedia article about hillbillies, that stereotyping of rural Appalachians causes feelings of shame, self-hatred, and detachment [...] as a result of "culturally transmitted traumatic stress syndrome" and that they are blamed for their own economic hardships because of labelling as moonshiners and welfare cheats.

[After I'd finished my review, I found Simon's at Tredynas Days, and he says that Wharton set her story in the area similar to the Berkshires where the author had built a house and got to know the locality and its dour rural inhabitants. But he also goes on to question what kind of 'knowing' that might be, characterising it as passing through these places in her large car with Henry James. I think many contemporary readers might also feel a bit uneasy about the judgements Wharton passes on these people. What kind of 'knowing' takes place when a wealthy woman builds a house, presumably insulated from the fading town and its mountain inhabitants by extensive gardens and servants? Did she 'know'? Or did she absorb gossip, stereotyping and suspicion at some remove?]

Whatever about that, the central character in Summer is constantly reminded that she is well out of it when brought down from the mountain as a child, by the lawyer Royall. She is renamed as Charity, and she takes his surname, but everyone in the town of North Dormer knows more about her antecedents than she does and they won't forget it. All she knows is that she has been lucky to escape a sordid life among sordid people. And as you'd expect in a small town in an era where girls had only two options, marriage or spinsterhood, her prospects were compromised by her dubious personal history.

Two complications arise: as she enters adolescence Lawyer Royall is attracted to Charity and she also attracts the attention of Lucius Harney from out of town.

To read the rest of my review of Summer please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2019/11/25/summer-in-ethan-frome-and-summer-by-edith-wh... ( )

Upon a non-literary friend's recommedation, I read Ethan Frome when I was at college. Last Christams I bought this edition which includes Summer which I began when elf was an infant, but it fell by the wayside, and then I couldn't find

Upon a non-literary friend's recommedation, I read Ethan Frome when I was at college. Last Christams I bought this edition which includes Summer which I began when elf was an infant, but it fell by the wayside, and then I couldn't find

All the way around, a tragedy. After an introductory chapter to a mysterious character, Wharton uses the technique flashback to show how guilt can anchor a person to a life of frustration. The story ends in a profound irony of life. Wonderfully written. ( )