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  • Published: 1 January 1993
  • ISBN: 9781101651292
  • Imprint: PEN US eBook Adult
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 216

Summer





Introducing Little Clothbound Classics: irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith

In 1917, when Edith Wharton published Summer, she was living in a France “steeped in the tragic realities of war.” Yet she set this book far away from Paris in the same dark, rigid New England she used for Ethan Frome. In such a place, she explored her most daring theme—a woman’s awakening to her sexual needs. The novel’s heroine, eighteen-year-old Charity Royall, is bored in the small town of North Dormer and ignorant of desire until she meets a visiting architect, Lucius Harney. Like the lush summer of the Berkshires around them, their romance is shimmering and idyllic, but its consequences are harsh and real. And the book, for its early twentieth-century audience, was shocking. Wharton’s pellucid prose, her raw depiction of the mountain community where Charity was born, the intrusion into Charity’s bedroom by her guardian, Lawyer Royall, and Charity’s rites of passage into adulthood elevate Summer into a groundbreaking study of society, nature, and human needs. Joseph Conrad prized this gem of a novel. The author herself favored it, and now the modern reader can experience the most erotic fiction Edith Wharton ever wrote with this handsome edition.

  • Published: 1 January 1993
  • ISBN: 9781101651292
  • Imprint: PEN US eBook Adult
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 216

Other books in the series

Emma
Persuasion
The Black Tulip
The Lady of the Camellias
On Sparta
Love
Annals
Military Dispatches

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