Courthouse Hill, Lenox
The slope of Main Street by the old Berkshire County Courthouse (now the Lenox Library) in Lenox, Massachusetts: the real sledding hill behind the fatal coast in Ethan Frome.
At a glance
| Source | Author | Role | In one line |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ethan Frome | Edith Wharton | turning point | Real model for the coast down to “the big elm” where Ethan and Mattie try to die together. |
Ethan Frome — Edith Wharton (1911)
Source: Ethan Frome · Readwise highlight
The big tree loomed bigger and closer, and as they bore down on it he thought: “It’s waiting for us: it seems to know.”
- Role: turning point
- In the book: The “smash-up” that Harmon Gow mentions in the frame story happens on the village coasting slope: the Corbury road falls away from the church past Lawyer Varnum’s house to “the big elm” at the bend. Ethan and Mattie coast it safely once on her last evening; then, rather than part, she begs him to take them “right into the big elm,” and he steers the sled straight at it. The frame narrator learns it happened “right below lawyer Varnum’s, down at the bend of the Corbury road.”
- Why it matters: The elm is the whole book’s hinge: the failed suicide turns a love story into twenty-four years of shared invalid life with Zeena. Any steep village hill would do for the plot, but the tree “lying in wait” at the bend is what gives the ending its fatalism.
- Real vs. fictional: Starkfield, the Corbury road and the elm are fictional. Wharton wrote from her years at The Mount in Lenox, and she likely drew the crash from a real 1904 accident in which young people sledding down Courthouse Hill in Lenox hit a lamppost; a girl, Emily Hazel Crosby, was killed (Wikipedia). Wharton’s own introduction places Starkfield only in “the same county” as her home.