Conventional and circumstance bind the young Ethan Frome to a wife he cannot love. Grimly resigned to his fate, he sees for himself a life as bleak and constricted as the New England farm on which he lives. Then the appearance in his bleak personal landscape of his ailing wife's orphaned young cousin, Mattie Silver, rouses in Ethan a fierce passion that provokes a last, desperate impulse to free himself from his dismal destiny.

Unlike Edith Wharton's other novels in that it is set among simple people in a small village, Ethan Frome shares with The house of mirth and The age of innocence its theme of how conventional conscience and the power of narrow local concerns work together to stifle what is most vital and compelling in the human spirit.