Ethan Frome
On a played-out farm above a Massachusetts hill village, a man tied to a sick and complaining wife takes in her penniless young cousin as household help and finds the winter suddenly bearable. Debt, his wife's watchfulness and the threat of a hired girl in the cousin's place close around them, while an engineer boarding in the village decades later assembles the story from what the neighbors will say. Wharton set her severest tragedy among the rural poor she had watched from Lenox, compressing a New England of silence and thrift into barely two hundred pages.
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Archetype (Jung / Campbell)
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- 51% · 12 shared