Summer

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 ...