Summer
1917
The novel opens on a New England summer, on a girl named Charity Royall standing at a window, watching a strange young man climb the hill toward her dead-end town. Wharton wrote this in 1917, thinking of it as "the Hot Ethan," and she wasn't wrong: Summer burns with a heat that her better-known novels barely hint at. Charity has been trapped in North Dormer since childhood, brought down from the Mountain, the place of her shameful origins, where her mother was a drunk and her father unknown. She works in a lawyer's office, surrounded by petty small-town gossip and people who whisper about where she came from. Then Lucius Harney arrives, a city boy with his own ambitions, and suddenly the world feels larger, more alive. What unfolds between them is a passionate affair, one that Wharton renders with startling frankness, this was 1917, and readers were shocked by its raw honesty about female desire. But Summer is more than a romance: it's a fierce examination of what it means to want more than the life you were born into, and what the world demands in return. Over a century later, the novel still feels dangerous. Wharton understood that wanting, that ache for something beyond your reach, is not a weakness. It's the most human thing there is.
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“...though she had not had the strength to shake off the spell that bound her to him she had lost all spontaneity of feeling, and seemed to herself to be passively awaiting a fate she could not avert.””
— Edith Wharton
“How I hate everything!””
— Edith Wharton
“She had always thought of love as something confused and furtive, and he made it as bright and open as the summer air.””
— Edith Wharton
“She had given him all she had - but what was it compared to the other gifts life held for him? She understood now the case of girls like herself to whom this kind of thing happened. They gave all they had, but their all was not enough; it could not buy more than a few moments...””
— Edith Wharton
“She was blind and insensible to many things, and dimly knew it; but to all that was light and air, perfume and colour, every drop of blood in her responded. She loved the roughness of the dry mountain grass under her palms, the smell of the thyme into which she crushed her face, the fingering of the wind in her hair and through her cotton blouse, and the creak of the larches as they swayed to it.””
— Edith Wharton
“Since the fanciful vision of the future that had flitted through her imagination at their first meeting she had hardly ever thought of his marrying her. She had not had to put the thought from her mind; it had not been there. If ever she looked ahead she felt instinctively that the gulf between them was too deep, and that the bridge their passion had flung across it was as insubstantial as a rainbow. But she seldom looked ahead; each day was so rich that it absorbed her....””
— Edith Wharton
“What did it matter where she came from, or whose child she was, when love was dancing in her veins?””
— Edith Wharton
“Whenever she was unhappy she felt herself at bay against a pitiless world, and a kind of animal secretiveness possessed her.””
— Edith Wharton
“She felt the pitiful inadequacy of this, and understood, with a sense of despair, that in her inability to express herself she must give him an impression of coldness and reluctance; but she could not help it.””
— Edith Wharton
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Wharton, Edith. Summer. Lex, lex-books.com/book/summer-9bb84db5-bb75-4bce-b848-258d888fbd91.Wharton, E. (1917). Summer. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/summer-9bb84db5-bb75-4bce-b848-258d888fbd91Wharton, Edith. Summer. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/summer-9bb84db5-bb75-4bce-b848-258d888fbd91.
