Summer
by Edith Wharton
Edith Wharton wrote a summer for Guyard Lapsley "known as Hot Ethan by its author and family." Clearly one of the first American novels about the sexual awakening of a young woman, this novel, when it appeared in 1917, was a publishing sensation that was highly respected by Joseph Conrad, Howard Sturgis and Percy Lubbock and compared positively to Madame Bovary. Like his predecessor Ethan Frome, set in the Berkshires, but the season is summer and the story is that Charity Royal, a New Englishman from a humble lineage – passionate, sincere and proud – and his terrifying romance with Lucius Harney, an artistically inclined young man from the city. As Marilyn French writes in her introduction, Summer, a novel that "breaks or prolongs the traditions of female romantic love stories and, in the process, creates a new picture of female sexuality," is "a cruel and ecstatic affirmation of the joy of sexual love, at all costs." Bold in concept, rich in image, and provocative in content, she was one of Edith Wharton's personal favorites and one of her greatest novelist achievements.
