“The subjective writer lacks the power of getting far enough away from his story to view it as a whole and relate it to its setting,” she observed in The Writing of Fiction.193 That detachment could lead her to be callous in her borrowing from real life: A carriage accident in which a neighbor fractured her skull and died went straight into The Fruit of the Tree.194 And the infamous sledding accident in Ethan Frome came from an actual tragedy in the winter of 1904 near her home in Lenox, Massachusetts.195
