Summer (Summarized Edition)

Summer (1917) follows Charity Royall in the New England hill country as a young woman's desire collides with the hard strata of class and law. Wharton's taut, sensuous prose couples local-color detail with a naturalist regard for social constraint, turning heat into both atmosphere and agent. Drawn to Lucius Harney, an architect cataloging vernacular houses, Charity's pastoral romance darkens into a study of dependency, reputation, and power—an explicit summer counterpart to Ethan Frome that fuses bildungsroman and regional tragedy. Edith Wharton, born into New York's patriciate and long resident at The Mount in Lenox, observed New England manners with an ethnographer's patience and a moralist's clarity. Her architectural interests and travel inform Harney's vocation, while restrictive social codes—sharpened by her divorce and wartime expatriation—focused her insight into transgression and female agency. In Summer she tests desire against geography and law. Readers of American realism, feminist literary history, or Thomas Hardy and Kate Chopin will find Summer accessible yet disquieting: swift, lyrically exact, and ethically unflinching. Ideal for classrooms and book clubs confronting consent, class mobility, and community surveillance—and for anyone attuned to how place scripts a life. Quickie Classics summarizes timeless works with precision, preserving the author's voice and keeping the prose clear, fast, and readable—distilled, never diluted. Enriched Edition extras: Introduction · Synopsis · Historical Context · Author Biography · Brief Analysis · 4 Reflection Q&As · Editorial Footnotes.