Ethan Frome, Summer, Bunner Sisters

by Edith Wharton

Wells: The Invisible Man.

  Robinson: The Children of the Night.

  1898 Treated as outpatient in Dr S. Weir Mitchell’s ‘rest-cure’ for nervous collapse. James: The Turn of the Screw.

  1899 Publishes first short story collection, The Greater Inclination. Travels in Europe. Gilman: Women and Economics.

  Thorstein Veblen: The Theory of the Leisure Class.

  Chopin: The Awakening.

  James: The Awkward Age.

  Norris: McTeague.

  Chekhov: The Lady with the Lap-dog.

  Birth of Hemingway.

  1900 Publishes The Touchstone (novella). Travels in Europe. Conrad: Lord Jim.

  Dreiser: Sister Carrie.

  Freud: The Interpretation of Dreams.

  1901 Buys 113-acre estate in Lenox, Massachusetts. Plans large house and gardens. Crucial Instances (stories) published. Mother dies. Edith inherits $90,000. Mann: Buddenbrooks.

  Nietzsche: The Will to Power.

  First Nobel Prize for Literature.

  HISTORICAL EVENTS

  New Zealand women secure the right to vote.

  World Columbian Exposition, Chicago.

  Cleveland regains office as US president (to 1897).

  The US becomes the leading manufacturing nation in the world.

  Nicholas II becomes Tsar.

  Dreyfus affair in France.

  Death of Engels (b. 1820).

  Freud’s Studies in Hysteria inaugurates psychoanalysis.

  William McKinley elected US president.

  Klondike Gold Rush.

  Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. German naval laws begin arms race.

  Curies discover radium. Invention of the cash register. Rockefeller ‘retires’ worth c. $200 million. Spanish–American War. Death of Gladstone (b. 1809).

  Moscow Arts Theatre founded.

  Florence Kelley becomes president of newly founded National Consumers’ League.

  Outbreak of Boer War.

  Planck’s quantum theory. First Zeppelin flight.

  US population 76 million. US railroad network just under 200,000 miles.

  Death of Queen Victoria; accession of Edward VII.

  Marconi transmits messages across the Atlantic.

  Assassination of President McKinley; Theodore Roosevelt becomes US president.

  Beginning of Picasso’s ‘Blue’ period.

  DATE AUTHOR’S LIFE LITERARY CONTEXT

  1902 Publishes first novel, The Valley of Decision, set in eighteenth-century Italy. Becomes friends with Theodore Roosevelt. Moves into ‘The Mount’, her new home in Lenox. Teddy has nervous illness. James: The Wings of the Dove. Gide: L’Immoraliste. William James: Varieties ofReligious Experience. Birth of Steinbeck.

  1903 Travels in Europe with Teddy. Meets Henry James and art critic Bernard Berenson. Begins The House of Mirth. James: The Ambassadors. Butler: The Way of All Flesh. G. E. Moore: Principia Ethica.

  1904 Buys her first automobile. Travels in England and France. Works on The House of Mirth throughout busy summer at ‘The Mount’. Guests include Henry James. Publishes Italian Villas and Their Gardens. Chekhov: The Cherry Orchard. James: The Golden Bowl. Conrad: Nostromo. Death of Kate Chopin.

  1905 Scribner’s serialization of The House of Mirth, January–November. Published 14 October in book form, it becomes best-seller (140,000 copies by the end of the year). Italian Backgrounds published (first of several travel books). Forster: Where Angels Fear to Tread. Shaw: Major Barbara.

  1906 Travels in England and France. Stage adaptation of The House of Mirth (with Clyde Fitch). Play fails in New York. Upton Sinclair: The Jungle. Death of Ibsen (b. 1828).

  1907 Rents apartment in Paris. Publishes The Fruit of the Tree. James: The American Scene. Henry Adams: The Education of Henry Adams.

  1907–12 Divides time between homes in US and Paris. Travels in England and Italy. Has affair with journalist Morton Fullerton (1908–10); writes love sonnets and a diary to him.

  1908 A Motor-Flight Through France. Forster: A Room with a View.

  1909 It is revealed that Teddy has embezzled $50,000 of Edith’s money. Gertrude Stein: Three Lives. Gide: La Porte étroite. Wells: Tono Bungay; Ann Veronica.

  1910 Moves to a new apartment in Paris and sells her New York houses. Death of Mark Twain (b. 1835). Forster: Howards End.

  HISTORICAL EVENTS

  Women in Australia are granted the vote.

  Women’s Trade Union League founded in New York.

  In Britain, Emmeline Pankhurst founds Women’s Social and Political Union.

  Wright brothers’ first successful powered flight.

  Death of Gauguin (b. 1848).

  Theodore Roosevelt re-elected US president.

  Russo-Japanese War (to 1905).

  Anglo-French Entente Cordiale. ‘La belle époque’ in France.

  First Russian Revolution. Separation of church and state in France.

  Series of mining disasters in US (to 1910); 2,494 killed.

  Einstein’s special theory of relativity.

  San Francisco earthquake.

  Clemenceau becomes French prime minister (to 1909).

  Currency panic in US; run on banks; J. P. Morgan imports $100 million in gold from Europe to halt crisis.

  Triple Entente of Britain, France and Russia.

  Cubism begins in Paris. Asquith becomes prime minister in Britain (to 1916).

  First Model T Ford car. Blériot flies across English Channel. Commercial manufacture of Bakelite means beginning of plastic age.

  Diaghilev founds Ballets Russes. Marinetti’s Futurist manifesto.

  Death of King Edward VII (b. 1841), who is succeeded by George V.

  DATE AUTHOR’S LIFE LITERARY CONTEXT

  1911 Drives through central Italy with Walter Berry. Ethan Frome (admired by reviewers). Dreiser: Jennie Gerhardt.

  1912 Worsening rifts with Teddy. Sells ‘The Mount’.

  Visits England. The Reef. Dreiser: The Financier.

  Mann: Death in Venice.

  1913 The Custom of the Country.

  Divorced from Teddy. Travels with Berry in Sicily and Bernard Berenson in Germany. Last visit to US for ten years. Proust: A la Recherche du temps perdu (to 1927).

  Alain-Fournier: Le Grand Meaulnes.

  Ellen Glasgow: Virginia.

  Lawrence: Sons and Lovers.

  Conrad: Chance.

  1914 Joyce: Dubliners.

  Gides: Les Caves du Vatican.

  1914–19 Based in Paris. Travels in North Africa and Spain. After outbreak of war, tireless fund-raising and other work for unemployed women, refugees, homeless children and tuberculosis convalescents. Visits front. Writes articles about life in the trenches for Scribner’s. Publishes Summer (1917) and The Marne (1918) and rents château at Hyères on the Mediterranean (1919).

  1915 Continues with a series of visits to the front lines, delivering medical supplies. Organizes Children of Flanders Rescue Committee. Forms friendship with André Gide, fellow worker at the hostels. Virginia Woolf: The Voyage Out.

  Ford: The Good Soldier.

  Lawrence: The Rainbow.

  Gilman: Herland.

  Roosevelt: America and the World War.

  1916 Made a Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur for her war work. Edits The Book of the Homeless, a fund-raising venture with contributions by distinguished writers, artists and musicians which raises $15,000. Bunner Sisters published in Xingu and Other Stories. Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

  Death of Henry James (b.1843).

  HISTORICAL EVENTS

  Agadir crisis. Chinese Revolution.

  Woodrow Wilson elected US president. Foundation of the ‘Bull Moose’ Party by Theodore Roosevelt and his followers, splitting the Republican Party completely. Poincaré becomes French prime minister, and is elected to the presidency the following year (to 1920). First Balkan War.

  Sinking of Titanic. Charlie Chaplin’s first film.

  Completion of new, even gr
ander, Grand Central Station building.

  Post-Impressionist exhibition in New York.

  Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring premiered in Paris, provoking riot.

  Second Balkan War.

  World War I (to 1918). President Wilson proclaims US neutrality. Ludlow Massacre: striking miners killed in Colorado. Panama Canal opens.

  Assassination of Jaurès, French socialist leader.

  Sinking of the Lusitania.

  Battle of the Somme – huge death tolls. Lloyd George British prime minister. Rasputin assassinated. Dada begins in Zürich.

  DATE AUTHOR’S LIFE LITERARY CONTEXT

  1917 Yeats: The Wild Swans at Coole.

  1918 Death of elder brother, Frederic

  Jones. Buys a villa in a village ten miles outside Paris. Cather: My Antonia.

  Hopkins: Poems.

  Rebecca West: The Return of the Soldier.

  1919 French Ways and their Meanings (to 1920). Woolf: Night and Day.

  Anderson: Winesburg, Ohio.

  Dos Passos: One Man’s Initiation – 1917.

  1920 The Age of Innocence. (Wins Pulitzer Prize, 1921, first

  awarded to a woman.) Katherine Mansfield: Bliss.

  Sinclair Lewis: Main Street.

  Lawrence: Women in Love.

  Pound: Hugh Selwyn Mauberley.

  1921 The Old Maid (novella) turned down by several magazines because of its theme of illegitimate birth. Huxley: Crome Yellow.

  1922 The Glimpses of the Moon sells more than 100,000 copies in six months. Lewis: Babbitt.

  Woolf: Jacob’s Room.

  Mansfield: The Garden Party.

  Joyce: Ulysses.

  T. S. Eliot: The Waste Land.

  Death of Proust.

  1922–31 Continues to travel, and buys her Hyères home. Reads and dislikes Ulysses and The Waste Land. Publishes The Writing of Fiction, several novels, collections of short stories and poems (including A Son at the Front, Old New York, The Mother’s Recompense.)

  1923 Pays short visit to US to receive honorary Doctorate of Letters. Scott Fitzgerald works on film version of The Glimpses of the Moon. Cather: A Lost Lady.

  Cummings: Tulips and Chimneys.

  Shaw: Saint Joan.

  1924 Ford: Parade’s End (to 1928).

  Mann: The Magic Mountain.

  HISTORICAL EVENTS

  Russian October Revolution. US enters war.

  Wilson proposes ‘Fourteen Points’ for world peace. Armistice (11 November). Worldwide ’flu epidemic kills millions. Women over thirty gain vote in Britain. Irish rebel Con Markievicz elected first British woman MP but refuses her seat. Rutherford splits the atom. Nicholas II assassinated. Civil war in Russia (to 1921).

  Versailles Peace Treaty (US refuses to ratify). Amendments 18 (Prohibition) and 19 (Women’s Suffrage) to US constitution. Strikes and race riots throughout US; the ‘Red Scare’.

  League of Nations meets for first time. Huge majority to right-wing Bloc National in French general election. Warren G. Harding elected US president. Slump in US. First radio broadcasting station. The ‘jazz rage’.

  Quota laws restrict immigration to US. Irish Free State created.

  Paris in the 1920s viewed as the cultural capital of the Western world, attracting artists and intellectuals of many nationalities. Famous expatriates there include Picasso, Man Ray, Miró, Chirico, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Ford, Joyce, Beckett, Durrell, and the ‘Lost Generation’ of American writers, e.g. Hemingway, Pound, Williams, Stein, Dos Passos, Anderson and Fitzgerald. Mussolini gains power in Italy. Revival of the Ku Klux Klan. Russia becomes USSR: Stalin becomes general secretary of the Communist Party.

  Talking pictures developed.

  Repeated German defaults on war reparations lead Poincaré (French prime minister once again) to send troops into the Ruhr Valley (to 1925). Financial crisis in Germany. Hitler’s Munich putsch fails. Calvin Coolidge elected US president after Harding’s death. Birth control clinic opened in New York.

  Economic boom in US (to 1929).

  Dawes Plan ends reparation crisis. Poincaré’s Bloc National defeated by a coalition of the left, the Cartel des Gauches. French financial crisis which seven cabinets (to 1926) fail to resolve.

  DATE AUTHOR’S LIFE LITERARY CONTEXT

  1925 Meets Scott Fitzgerald and Sinclair Lewis. Cather: The Professor’s House.

  Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby.

  Dreiser: An American Tragedy.

  Stein: The Making of Americans.

  Dos Passos: Manhattan Transfer.

  Woolf: Mrs Dalloway; The Common Reader.

  Gide: Les Faux-monnayeurs.

  Kafka: The Trial.

  1926 Fitzgerald: All the Sad Young Men.

  Hemingway: The Sun Also Rises.

  Bromfield: Early Autumn.

  1927 Death of Walter Berry. Attempts by literary figures in the US to promote Wharton for the Nobel Prize end in failure. Woolf: To the Lighthouse.

  Hemingway: Men without Women.

  Cather: Death Comes for the Archbishop.

  Mauriac: Thérèse Desqueyroux.

  1928 Death of Teddy Wharton. Woolf: Orlando.

  Lawrence: Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

  Waugh: Decline and Fall.

  Huxley: Point Counter Point.

  Yeats: The Tower.

  1929 Awarded Gold Medal by American Academy of Arts and Letters. Hudson River Bracketed. Woolf: A Room of One’s Own.

  Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury.

  Hemingway: A Farewell to Arms.

  1930 Aldous Huxley and Cyril Connolly visit Wharton at Hyères. Dos Passos: The 42nd Parallel.

  Faulkner: As I Lay Dying.

  Hammett: The Maltese Falcon.

  Hart Crane: The Bridge.

  Freud: Civilization and Its Discontents.

  Death of Lawrence.

  1932 The Gods Arrive. Writing autobiography, A Backward Glance. Visits Rome. Becomes increasingly interested in Roman Catholicism. Glasgow: The Sheltered Life.

  Huxley: Brave New World.

  1933 Begins work on The Buccaneers (published 1938). Stein: The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.

  Ivy Compton Burnett: More Women than Men.

  Céline: Voyage au bout de la nuit.

  HISTORICAL EVENTS

  ‘Monkey Trial’ (Scopes), Dayton, Tennessee.

  Al Capone a powerful force in Chicago.

  First public demonstration of television.

  Period of Franco-German reconciliation under foreign minister Briand (to 1930); Locarno Pact guarantees existing frontiers.

  First Surrealist exhibition in Paris.

  Adolf Hitler: Mein Kampf.

  General Strike in UK. Germany joins the League of Nations. Poincaré resumes premiership and succeeds in stabilizing French economy. Chanel launches the ‘little black dress’.

  Lindbergh’s solo Atlantic flight.

  Kellog–Briand Pact outlaws war. First Five-Year Plan in USSR; Stalin is de facto dictator. 26 million cars and 13 million radios in use in US. Herbert Hoover elected US president. Amelia Earhart becomes first woman to fly the Atlantic solo.

  New York stock market crash. A worldwide depression follows. Mass unemployment.

  Museum of Modern Art in New York founded. Empire State Building opened. Gandhi begins civil disobedience campaign in India.

  The 1930s see increasingly unstable government in France, with 20 changes of premier. Construction of Maginot line begins (to 1939).

  Unemployment in US rises to 13 million. Franklin D. Roosevelt becomes president. Lindbergh’s son kidnapped. German war reparations suspended indefinitely at Lausanne. President Doumer assassinated in France.

  New Deal begins; Prohibition repealed. Hitler becomes chancellor of Germany; Germany begins to re-arm. Growth of Fascist movement in France.

  DATE AUTHOR’S LIFE LITERARY CONTEXT

  1934 A Backward Glance published. Fitzgerald: Tender is the Night.

  Miller: Tropic of Cancer.

  Waug
h: A Handful of Dust.

  1935 Stage version of The Old Maid wins Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Elizabeth Bowen: The House in Paris.

  Cather: Lucy Gayheart.

  1936 Successful dramatization of Ethan Frome. T. S. Eliot: Collected Poems.

  Dos Passos: The Big Money.

  Faulkner: Absalom, Absalom!

  Santayana: The Last Puritan.

  West: The Thinking Reed.

  Margaret Mitchell: Gone with the Wind.

  1937 Completes final short story, ‘All Souls’. Suffers a stroke in June. Dies 11 August. Buried at Versailles. Woolf: The Years.

  Hemingway: To Have and Have Not.

  Wallace Stevens: The Man with the Blue Guitar.

  HISTORICAL EVENTS

  Stavisky scandal in France. Stalin’s purge of the Communist Party underway in USSR. Hitler becomes German Führer.

  Mussolini invades Abyssinia. National Labour Relations Act in US. Nuremberg laws in Germany.

  Left-wing Front Populaire win French general election; Léon Blum becomes first Socialist prime minister. Hitler marches into demilitarized Rhineland.

  Death of George V is followed by the accession and abdication of Edward VIII who wishes to marry the American divorcee, Mrs Simpson.

  Spanish Civil War begins.

  Fall of Blum. Chamberlain becomes British prime minister. German air attack on Guernica. Japan occupies Peking and Shanghai.

  First jet engine and nylon stockings.

  In the US approximately 75 million visit movies every week.

  ETHAN FROME

  I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.

  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.