Every novelist has been visited by the insinuating wraiths of false 'good situations,' siren-subjects luring his cockle-shell to the rocks their voice is oftenest heard, and their mirage-sea beheld, as he traverses the waterless desert which awaits him half-way through whatever work is actually in hand.

This incompatibility between subject and plan would perhaps have seemed to suggest that my 'situation' was after all one to be rejected. They were, in truth, these figures, my granite outcroppings but half-emerged from the soil, and scarcely more articulate. It must be treated as starkly and summarily as life had always presented itself to my protagonists any attempt to elaborate and complicate their sentiments would necessarily have falsified the whole. But I never thought this for a moment, for I had felt, at the same time, that the theme of my tale was not one on which many variations could be played. This enforced lapse of time would seem to anyone persuaded- as I have always been- that every subject (in the novelist's sense of the term) implicitly contains its own form and dimensions, to mark Ethan Frome as the subject for a novel.

The problem before me, as I saw in the first flash, was this: I had to deal with a subject of which the dramatic climax, or rather the anti-climax, occurs a generation later than the first acts of the tragedy. So much for the origin of the story there is nothing else of interest to say of it, except as concerns its construction. I give the impression merely as a personal one it accounts for 'Ethan Frome,' and may, to some readers, in a measure justify it. Even the abundant enumeration of sweet-fern, asters and mountain-laurel, and the conscientious reproduction of the vernacular, left me with the feeling that the outcropping granite had in both cases been overlooked. Even before that final initiation, however, I had had an uneasy sense that the New England of fiction bore little- except a vague botanical and dialectical- resemblance to the harsh and beautiful land as I had seen it. I had known something of New England village life long before I made my home in the same county as my imaginary Starkfield though, during the years spent there, certain of its aspects became much more familiar to me.

Edith wharton ethan