"Cliff Notes - Ethan Frome" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cliff Notes)

EDITH WHARTON: THE AUTHOR AND HER TIMES

It's hard to imagine a less likely author for Ethan Frome than
Edith Wharton, for this story of a poverty-stricken, lonely
farmer was written by a wealthy, middle-aged member of New York
City's high society.

Edith Wharton probably never spent a day of her life inside the
sort of poor New England farmhouse occupied by Ethan, his wife
Zeena, and their boarder Mattie Silver. It's a world she
visited only in her imagination. Even so, she draws a realistic
picture of the dark, cramped, cheerless rooms of the Fromes'
living quarters. And her portrayal of poor farm people has the
ring of truth.

Soon after Ethan Frome was published, a friend of Wharton's
reported that she and the author had once driven around the
Berkshire hills. They had paused briefly near a run-down farm.
Wharton looked at the battered, unpainted house and littered
yard and said she intended to write a story about a place like
that. Moreover, Wharton claimed to have spent "an hour" at a
Lenox, Massachusetts meetinghouse observing the speech and
manner of the local citizens, and trying to imagine what their
lives must be like. But whether Edith Wharton ever spoke with
them, shared a meal with them, or visited them in their homes is
not known. It's not very probable because the social gap was
just too wide.

Wharton was accustomed to life on New York's fashionable Fifth
Avenue. At least that's where she was born Edith Jones on
January 24, 1862. To avoid the turmoil of the Civil War, her
parents--George and Lucretia Jones took their family to Europe,
where life was safer. Before she was ten, Wharton had lived in
Rome and Paris. She had toured Spain and Germany and wintered
on the French Riviera.

The Jones family returned to New York in 1872 and settled into
their East Side brownstone. Instead of going to school, Wharton
had tutors. Instead of a circle of friends her own age, Wharton
had her family. And instead of the usual toys and amusements of
most children, Wharton had her father's ample library, where she
read hungrily.

In the 1870s girls of Wharton's social class generally did what
their parents told them to do. What filled her parents' lives
filled Edith's too: Parisian fashions, planning dinner parties
and balls, the problems with maids and butlers, where to spend
the holidays--the rituals of a plush red-velvet life.