Summer (version 2)

In the stifling hills of rural New England, Charity Royall suffocates quietly. Adopted as a child from the poor Mountain community and raised by the aging lawyer Mr. Royall, she has grown into a young woman whose ambitions extend no further than the gaslit streets of a city she has never seen. When Lucius Harney arrives to document the decaying architecture of North Dormer, he brings with him the promise of escape, and something more dangerous: the first stirrings of desire. But Harney is not the savior Charity imagines. As summer intensifies, she discovers that desire and desperation are easily confused, and that some doors, once opened, lead only to more confinement. Wharton's 1917 novella is a piercing examination of female sexuality, class constraint, and the illusions we construct to survive.