Book duration 72 pages
2012 year
Ethan Frome
About the book
A level 3 Oxford Bookworms Library graded readers. Retold for Learners of English by Susan Kingsley.
Life is always hard for the poor, in any place and at any time. Ethan Frome is a farmer in Massachusetts. He works long hours every day, but his farm makes very little money. His wife, Zeena, is a thin, grey woman, always complaining, and only interested in her own ill health.
Then Mattie Silver, a young cousin, comes to live with the Fromes, to help Zeena and do the housework. Her bright smile and laughing voice bring light and hope into the Fromes’ house – and into Ethan’s lonely life.
But poverty is a prison from which few people escape…
Genres and tags
It was in the early morning stillness, when his muscles were swinging to their familiar task and his lungs expanding with long draughts of mountain air, that Ethan did his clearest thinking.
I HAD the story, bit by bit, from various people and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.
Beyond the orchard lay a field or two, their boundaries lost under drifts; and above the fields, huddled against the white immensities of land and sky, one of those lonely New England farm-houses that make the landscape lonelier.
Ethan was suffocated with the sense of wellbeing.
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
