A farmer trapped by a hard New England winter, a sick wife who rules from her chair, and the girl who has come to keep house for them. Wharton framed it as a story reconstructed by a stranger years later, so the reader knows from the first pages that something has already gone wrong. She wrote it as a stylistic exercise and produced the least forgiving book of her career. A hundred plates of nineteenth-century American painting, from Winslow Homer and George Inness to harvest fields and farmhands, carry the same bleak northern light that hangs over Starkfield.
