Complete and unabridged, with 58 full-page plates by William Powell Frith, John William Godward and John Everett Millais. 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. Fifty-eight plates of painting from 1840 to 1907, including a self portrait and likenesses by James Atkinson and George Chinnery, carry the novel's own theme of faces fixed by a hard winter.