Recommendations
Books Like Ethan Frome
Best books to read after Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome is a spare, perfectly constructed novella about a New England farmer whose attempted escape from a loveless marriage ends in catastrophe. These recommendations extend the experience through Wharton's other major novels and through American fiction about trapped protagonists and inescapable situations.
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The House of Mirth
by Edith Wharton
Wharton's most celebrated novel — Lily Bart's slow decline from the top of New York society to its bottom. The same pattern as Ethan Frome (a protagonist whose circumstances become inescapable) in a very different social world, with the same tragic precision.
- 2Buy
The Age of Innocence
by Edith Wharton
Wharton's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about Newland Archer's choice to remain in a loveless engagement rather than pursue the woman he loves — another Wharton novel about the costs of social conformity and the impossibility of escape from it.
- 3Buy
The Custom of the Country
by Edith Wharton
Wharton's satirical novel about Undine Spragg, a Midwestern beauty who uses marriage serially to ascend New York and European society — the inverse of Ethan Frome, a novel about someone who always escapes, told with equal sardonic precision.
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Summer
by Edith Wharton
Wharton's companion novella to Ethan Frome — set in the same New England landscape, about a young woman named Charity Royall who falls in love with an architect visiting for the summer and discovers the full weight of her circumstances. Wharton called them her 'New England novels.'
- 5Buy
Tess of the d'Urbervilles
by Thomas Hardy
Hardy's novel about a country girl whose life is destroyed by the social consequences of a man's violence — the British equivalent of Wharton's American moral realism, in which a protagonist's fate is determined by the gap between human desire and social reality.
- 6Buy
The Awakening
by Kate Chopin
Chopin's 1899 novel about a woman who awakens to desires the social world offers her no way to fulfill — published the same year as Wharton's early work, sharing the same preoccupation with the costs of female entrapment.
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Jude the Obscure
by Thomas Hardy
Hardy's most devastating novel, about a stonemason whose ambitions for education and love are systematically crushed by the social order — the parallel to Ethan Frome in its bleakness and its insistence that some people's circumstances are inescapable.
- 8Buy
Of Mice and Men
by John Steinbeck
Steinbeck's novella about George and Lennie's shared dream of a small farm — doomed from the beginning by Lennie's disability and the world's indifference to human dreams. Shares Ethan Frome's devastating economy of form and its interest in entrapment.
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