the movement of people westward and from the remote rural areas to the larger or mid-size New England cities and towns, leaving the smaller villages even further behind in relative prosperity. Changes in patterns of transportation did little but reinforce the varying chances for potential success and economic opportunity among inhabitants of these different localities. Proud New Yorkers would have accepted the claim that at the end of the century the city’s cultural enhancements had matched its economic progress, and that New York had eclipsed Boston as the nation’s literary center.

Wharton would have been aware that the first fateful meeting between Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) and Herman Melville (1819-1891) occurred in the Berkshires. Several of their charged encounters took place in “the little red house” in Lenox that the former occupied following his departure from Salem and after the publication of The Scarlet Letter (1850). She would have known that Hawthorne’s stay in the Berkshires marked the period of composition for The House of the Seven Gables (1851), his romance about the cold and paralyzing hold that the dead hand of the past has on subsequent generations. In his preface to that work Hawthorne disclaimed a rigid adherence to rendering an actual New England locality, but in noting an author’s faithfulness to his creation, maintained that he might “manage his atmospherical medium as to bring out or mellow the lights and deepen and enrich the shadows of the picture.” In his volume The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales (1851), Hawthorne included a tale with the title character Ethan Brand, a name with potential resonance for Wharton’s own New England stories. (Ethan Frome is a character literally “branded” with a red gash across his forehead, one of the effects of the “smash-up,” and one of Wharton’s Starkfield stories, “Bewitched” [1925], contains characters named Brand.) If Wharton’s tendency was to discount the influence on her work of American, and especially of New England, writers in favor of their European counterparts, several critics have nevertheless discerned Hawthornean echoes, not the least of which is her use in Ethan Frome of the name Zenobia, which Hawthorne used for a character in The Blithedale Romance (1852). The use of Puritan names (such as Ethan, Jotham, and Endurance), the impact of the past on the present, the tension between cold isolation and the warmth of community—a range of Wharton’s themes and techniques seem to derive from Hawthorne. This is a general debt she seemed to acknowledge in her autobiography when she counseled “New Englanders who had for years sought reflection of local life” (A Backward Glance, p. 294) in the pages of other authors not to forget Hawthorne’s signal contributions in that vein.

In the introduction to a student’s edition of Ethan Frome, published eleven years after the novel’s first appearance, Wharton claimed that her knowledge of New England village life derived from firsthand observation and experience. She was referring to her initial visits to the region, her establishment of a home there, and her fairly frequent sojourns across the countryside of western Massachusetts. As noted in the reminiscence of a friend who visited her during her days in Lenox:

One windy afternoon we were driving in the country near Lenox, and on the top of a hill on the left of the road stood a battered two-story house, unpainted, with a neglected door-yard tenanted by hens and chickens, and a few bedraggled children sitting on the stone steps before the open door. “It is about a place like that,” said Mrs. Wharton, “that I mean to write a story. Only last week I went to the village meeting-house in Lenox and sat there for an hour alone, trying to think what such lives must be, and some day I shall write a story about it” (quoted in Lubbock, Portrait of Edith Wharton, pp. 22-23).

If this image of a neglected, decaying farmhouse provided some initial inspiration for her story, Wharton later claimed that previous literary renderings of the region had presented only a partial picture that failed to capture the harsh effects of its forbidding landscape. Previous writers may have accurately documented the region’s botanical and dialectal traits—that is, its plants and trees, and the vernacular speech of its inhabitants—but Wharton sensed that what she called the “outcropping granite” had been overlooked. (Extending her figure of stone emerging from native soil, she wittily commented on the taciturn demeanor of New Englanders, scarcely more articulate than the cold, hard outcroppings under their feet.) While not mentioning the names of