Summer
In the sweltering hills of a small New England town, a young woman named Charity Royall discovers that desire is a force no social code can contain. Orphaned and raised by a reclusive lawyer, Charity has known loneliness her whole life, until the summer when everything changes. A visiting architect awakens in her something fierce and unstoppable: passion, hunger, the terrible beauty of wanting. Wharton, with her signature precision and understated fury, maps every tremor of this awakening with an honesty that felt almost scandalous in 1917. But this is no romance. Summer is a tragedy in the classic sense: we watch a woman reach for something beautiful and see the world close around her like a fist. The novel endures because it asks a question we still struggle with: what happens to a woman who wants too much in a world that permits her nothing?
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