This is my first EDITH WHARTON book. It was amazing. In just 99 pages, she developed the characters FULLY, described their emotions so that you really "FELT" them, and she shared a piece of American history when times were very tough for many people.
LOVE
PASSION
DESIRE
JEALOUSY
PAIN (physical/emotional)
TRAGEDY
DESPAIR
FUTILITY........
Written in 1911, her writing isn't complicated, but it's FULL, and the way she describes things is INTRIGUING, WELL-WRITTEN and often THOUGHT-PROVOKING.
Perhaps the following excerpts will inspire YOU to read ETHAN FROME.....
Page 6
"That Frome farm was always 'bout as bare's a milkpan when the cat's been round....."
Page 8
..... and at the appointed hour his sleigh glided up through the snow like a stage-apparition behind thickening veils of gauze.
Page 9
About a mile farther, on a road I had never travelled, we came to an orchard of starved apple-trees writhing over a hillside among outcroppings of slate that nuzzled up through the snow like animals pushing out their noses to breathe. Beyond the orchard lay a field or two, their boundaries lost under drifts; and above the fields, huddled against the white immensities of land and sky, one of those lonely New England farm-houses that make the landscape lonelier.
Page 17
When she said to him once: "It looks just as if it was painted!" it seemed to Ethan that the art of definition could go no farther, and that words had at last been found to utter his secret soul.....
Page 18
"The doctor don't want I should be left without anybody to do for me," she said in her flat whine.
Page 85
The clumps of trees in the snow seemed to draw together in ruffled lumps, like birds with their heads under their wings; and the sky, as it paled, rose higher, leaving the earth more alone.
I'm now INSPIRED to read and enjoy her 1921 PULITZER-PRIZE winning book - THE AGE OF INNOCENCE.
JOAN
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