Fiction · 1917
Summer
Summer follows Charity Royall, an orphan raised without affection by her adoptive guardian, the lawyer Mr. Royall, in a dying Massachusetts hill town she longs to escape. A love affair that summer with a visiting young architect, Lucius Harney, briefly gives her the wider life she's wanted, before it collapses into consequences the town has no gentle way of handling and Mr. Royall — a more complicated, more compromised guardian than he first appears — becomes the only person left who can do anything for her.
Edith Wharton published Summer in 1917, calling it privately her "hot Ethan Frome" for its similarly bleak New England setting; unlike most of her fiction, set among the wealthy, it follows rural poverty with an unusual directness about sex and its costs for a young woman with no money and no protection.
Bibliomancer publishes the 1917 text exactly as Edith Wharton wrote it.
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About this edition
The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.
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About the author
1862–1937 · Modern
Edith Wharton (1862–1937) was born Edith Newbold Jones into old New York society, published her first book, on interior decoration, in 1897, and her first novel in 1902. The House of Mirth (1905), Ethan Frome (1911), The Custom of the Country (1913) and The Age of Innocence (1920), which won the Pulitzer Prize, are the best known of more than forty books. She lived in France from 1907 and was decorated for her relief work in the First World War.
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