'He seemed a part of the mute melancholy landscape an incarnation of its frozen woe with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface'<br><br>Ethan Frome works his unproductive farm and struggles to maintain a bearable existence with his difficult suspicious and hypochondriac wife Zeena. But when Zeena's vivacious cousin enters their household as a 'hired girl' Ethan finds himself obsessed with her and with the possibilities for happiness she comes to represent. <br><br>In one of American fiction's finest and most intense narratives Edith Wharton moves this ill-starred trio towards their tragic destinies.