of English novelist Anthony Trollope (1815-1882), especially in her later years. Mrs. Roby is amused by Trollope, while the self-conscious and pretentious members of the Lunch Club believe literature has other aims: to elevate and to instruct.

5 (p. 206) “as Apelles, in representing the sacrifice of Iphigenia, veiled the face of Agamemnon”: The celebrated Greek painter Apelles (c.330 B.C.) rendered mythological stories in his paintings; but it was another painter of ancient Greece, Timanthes (c.400 B.C.), whose Sacrifice of Iphigenia portrayed the legend of Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia. In the painting Timanthes veiled Agamemnon’s face, choosing not to portray his emotions; the “veil of Timanthes” has become synonymous with emotional restraint.

6 (p. 207) “which has attracted more attention among thoughtful people than any novel since ’Robert Elsmere’ ”: Robert Elsmere (1888) was a popular spiritual romance by English novelist Mrs. Humphry Ward. Wharton visited Ward’s English estate in the summer of 1909.

7 (p. 207) “It reminded me when I read it of Prince Rupert’s manière noire”: Manière noire is French for “dark manner.” Ruprecht of Pfalz (1619-1682), known as Prince Rupert, Count Palatine of the Rhine, was a general and an artist; he was instrumental in bringing the art of mezzotint portraiture to England. His The Executioner’s Head, better known as “The Little Executioner,” is perhaps his most celebrated work.

8 (p. 208) Canst thou draw out leviathan with a hook?: The quotation comes from the Bible, Job 41:1-2 (King James Version). The full passage reads: “Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook? Or his tongue with a cord which thou lettest down? Canst thou put an hook into his nose? Or bore his jaw through with a thorn?”

9 (p. 215) “It’s very long”: Wharton here begins a series of puns on Xingu, which the club members, with the exception of the playful Mrs. Roby, interpret as some kind of profound and perhaps even dangerous philosophy.

COMMENTS & QUESTIONS

In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the works, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the works’ history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome and Selected Stories through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of these enduring works.

Comments

THE NEW YORK TIMES SATURDAY REVIEW OF BOOKS

In “The Pretext” ... we have a bit of pattern weaving of considerable intricacy and of balanced and harmonious design. There are half a dozen possible answers to the suggested question, but the construction of the story is consistent and firm. The characters are clearly seen and produce upon us the effect they would produce in life. There is, perhaps, too obvious a denigration of the narrow setting—there have been pictures of narrower and colder aspects of our American scene that have managed to retain their local charm without the application on the part of their historian of a flattering coat of rose color; but the painter of human character is only rarely as competent a portraitist of places, and Mrs. Wharton is above all a delineator of character.

—October 3, 1908

LOUISE COLLIER WILLCOX

There is a certain inexorableness about Mrs. Wharton, as if she herself were constitutionally opposed to happiness, as if she were somewhat compelled to interpret life in terms of pain. Hence her beautifully told but somber tales are so unrelieved, fate in them is so persistently adverse, that they are sometimes not quite convincing. For after all, what men account as Fate does sometimes smile, and pain is pain by contrast with joy. But this particular story of three people, Ethan Frome, his wife Zeena, and Mattie Silver, is so swift, direct, and inevitable that it commands belief. The man, Ethan Frome, an undeveloped idealist, marrying, not for love, but because of feminine proximity and an instinctive recoil from loneliness, then finding beside him his fitting counterpart; the mutual happiness so wan and brief, the swift end, and then the long twilight of that truest heroism—the heroism of endurance—this finely self-consistent story takes firm hold of mind and imagination. And it is told, of course, with all Mrs. Wharton’s rare skill. The forcible right words, like apples of gold in frames of silver, are all here. The seeing and perceiving eye and the divining mind, with all their complexities of observation and