Ethan Frome Criticism

This Study Guide consists of approximately 60 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of Ethan Frome.

Ethan Frome Criticism

This Study Guide consists of approximately 60 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of Ethan Frome.
This section contains 664 words
(approx. 2 pages at 400 words per page)
Buy the Ethan Frome Study Guide

Critics generally regard Ethan Frome as a departure from Wharton's usual subject matter. Wharton herself remarked that "it was frequently criticized as 'painful,' and at first had much less success than my previous books." The enduring popularity of the novel has somewhat cynically been attributed to its brevity and its place in the high school and college curriculum. Yet, wrote the critic R. Baird Shuman, it "remains a monument in the Edith Wharton canon." According to Allen F. Stein, the novel represents "the fullest treatment of the disasters that can occur when one attempts to leave even a repellent marriage." And biographer Cynthia Griffin Wolff calls Ethan Frome "a tantalizingly literary work.".

At the time of the novel's publication in 1911, a review in the Nation praised the style as "assured and entirely individual." In a review titled "Three Lives in Supreme Torture," the New York...

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This section contains 664 words
(approx. 2 pages at 400 words per page)
Buy the Ethan Frome Study Guide
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Ethan Frome from Gale. ©2005-2006 Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation. All rights reserved.