Summer

Seventeen-year-old Charity Royall longs to escape the narrow life of North Dormer, a small New England town where opportunities are scarce and the boundaries of her future seem already determined. Raised by lawyer Royall after being brought down as a child from the impoverished community known as the Mountain, Charity is acutely aware of both the circumstances of her birth and the limited world in which she has grown up.The arrival of Lucius Harney, a young architect visiting the region to study its old houses, opens the possibility of something different. Sophisticated, educated, and connected to a world beyond North Dormer, Harney awakens in Charity a powerful mixture of romantic desire, sexual discovery, and hope for escape. Their relationship unfolds during a vivid New England summer, as the landscape itself seems to expand alongside Charity’s sense of what life might offer.But the differences between them cannot easily be escaped. Class, money, reputation, gender, and social expectation increasingly shape the choices available to Charity. What begins with the exhilaration of possibility gradually confronts the realities of dependence and unequal power. Wharton treats Charity’s desire seriously, neither condemning it nor allowing romance to obscure the conditions under which a young woman without wealth or social position must make decisions about her future.Charity’s complicated relationship with Royall adds another dimension to her struggle for independence. At once guardian, authority figure, and source of resentment, he represents much of what she wishes to leave behind. Meanwhile, the Mountain remains both a reminder of the origins from which she has been separated and an unsettling alternative to the respectable but restrictive society of North Dormer.First published in 1917, Summer shifts Edith Wharton’s penetrating examination of class and social constraint away from the drawing rooms of wealthy New York and into rural New England. Through Charity, Wharton explores female desire, coming of age, economic vulnerability, social hierarchy, and the distance between imagining freedom and possessing the means to achieve it.Sensual, unsentimental, and psychologically perceptive, Summer is a story about the intoxicating discovery of desire and the consequences that follow when private longing encounters the realities of class and circumstance. Wharton captures both the exhilaration of a young woman awakening to a larger world and the difficult question at the novel’s center: how free can a person truly be when the choices available to her have already been shaped by forces beyond her control?