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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

The New Penguin Book Of American Short Stories, From Washington Irving To Lydia Davis
A Dog's Heart
The Black Tulip
The Lady of the Camellias
Selected Poetry
On Sparta
Venus in Furs
Man and Superman
Botchan
Military Dispatches

About the author

Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton was born in New York City on January 24, 1862. Edith married Teddy Wharton, who was 12 years older. They lived a life of relative ease with homes in New York, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts. Edith became a prolific writer and produced over 40 books in 40 years. Edith divorced Teddy in 1912, having no immediate heirs, and never married again. She was the first woman awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, an honorary Doctorate of Letters from Yale University, and a full membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her novels became so popular that Ms. Wharton was able to live comfortably on her earnings the rest of her life. Edith continued to write until a stroke took her life in August 1937.

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