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.
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