Ethan Frome is a 1911 book by American author Edith Wharton. It is set in the fictitious town of Starkfield, Massachusetts. The novel was adapted into a film, Ethan Frome, in 1993. Society and Morality as Obstacles to the Fulfillment of Desire. The constraint social and moral concerns place on individual desire is perhaps the novel's most prominent theme, since Ethan Frome's plot is concerned with Ethan's desire for a woman who is not his wife. Ethan Frome takes place against a backdrop of the cold, gray, bleakness of a New England winter. Ethan Frome is an isolated farmer trying to scrape out a meager living while also tending to his frigid, demanding and ungrateful wife, Zeena.