Ethan Frome is rather a changeling in Wharton's large output, a short, bleak rural novel set in New England - rather as if Hardy had been crossed with Hawthorne. In America it was for a long time her best-known book, and she herself thought particularly well of it because it marked the end of her long literary apprenticeship. The three novels in the second volume are Madame de Treymes (little more than a short story), The Reef and the unfinished The Buccaneers. The Reef frankly, is a bore, and it must be admitted that Wharton's lesser works are scarcely better than competent upper-middlebrow fiction, not to be compared with her masterpiece The Age of Innocence.