Summer

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.