Mining the real rural New England

The Mount, the (mostly)summer mansion built for Edith Wharton in 2002 in Lenox, Mass., in the Berkshires.

"I had known something of New England village life long before I made my home in the same county {Berkshire County, Mass.} as my imaginary Starkfield; though, during the years spent there, certain of its aspects became much more familiar to me. 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. 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. I give the impression merely as a personal one; it accounts for Ethan Frome, and may, to some readers, in a measure justify it.''

-- Introduction to the novel Ethan Frome, by Edith Wharton