“If you know Starkfield, Massachusetts, you know the post-office. If you know the post-office you must have seen Ethan Frome drive up to it, drop the reins on his hollow-backed bay and drag himself across the brick pavement to the white colonnade; and you must have asked who he was.”
So begins Edith Wharton’s novella Ethan Frome (1911), which is based on a fatal sledding accident in 1904 at the intersection of Hawthorne St. and Old Stockbridge Rd. in Lenox. By her attempt to discern a lesson, or moral, from an historical event, Wharton keeps good company with fellow Berkshire writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose Scarlet Letter also is based on old Salem history.
Born Edith Newbold Jones on Jan. 24, 1862 in New York City, Edith Wharton died on Aug. 11, 1837 in France, where she was buried at Versailles with the honors owed a war hero and a chevalier of the Legion of Honor, France’s response to her service during the war. She is the first woman awarded a Pulitzer Prize, in 1921, for The Age of innocence.
Like her fellow Berkshire writer Herman Melville, Edith Wharton had an ancestor who was a general in the American Revolution.