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- Herausgeber: Quickie Classics
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
Summer (1917) follows Charity Royall in the New England hill country as a young woman's desire collides with the hard strata of class and law. Wharton's taut, sensuous prose couples local-color detail with a naturalist regard for social constraint, turning heat into both atmosphere and agent. Drawn to Lucius Harney, an architect cataloging vernacular houses, Charity's pastoral romance darkens into a study of dependency, reputation, and power—an explicit summer counterpart to Ethan Frome that fuses bildungsroman and regional tragedy. Edith Wharton, born into New York's patriciate and long resident at The Mount in Lenox, observed New England manners with an ethnographer's patience and a moralist's clarity. Her architectural interests and travel inform Harney's vocation, while restrictive social codes—sharpened by her divorce and wartime expatriation—focused her insight into transgression and female agency. In Summer she tests desire against geography and law. Readers of American realism, feminist literary history, or Thomas Hardy and Kate Chopin will find Summer accessible yet disquieting: swift, lyrically exact, and ethically unflinching. Ideal for classrooms and book clubs confronting consent, class mobility, and community surveillance—and for anyone attuned to how place scripts a life. Quickie Classics summarizes timeless works with precision, preserving the author's voice and keeping the prose clear, fast, and readable—distilled, never diluted. Enriched Edition extras: Introduction · Synopsis · Historical Context · Author Biography · Brief Analysis · 4 Reflection Q&As · Editorial Footnotes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2026
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Summer (Summarized Edition)
Table of Contents
Introduction
In Summer, the surge of a young woman’s desire presses against the narrow boundaries of a watchful community, setting heat and light against the chill of duty, class, and law as the season’s radiance exposes the costs of freedom, the forms of power that police it, and the fragile hope that self-knowledge can be claimed without surrendering to the forces that would name, chaperone, and contain her, in a place where the past clings to every threshold and the future must be bargained for in shadows, as the landscape mirrors a body awakening while customs and judgments conspire to turn passion into a test of courage and cost.
Published in 1917, Edith Wharton’s Summer is a short, unsparing novel set in the fictional New England village of North Dormer during the early twentieth century. Blending the coming-of-age story with the social novel, it pairs close psychological attention with a keen sense of place, its sunlit hills and dusty roads framing a drama of class and propriety. Composed at a moment when modern American life was accelerating and the First World War shadowed the Atlantic world, the book narrows its gaze to local textures and codes, showing how an isolated community shapes, disciplines, and sometimes deforms the longings of those who grow up within it.
At the center is Charity Royall, a teenage girl taken in as a child by Lawyer Royall, who keeps house with her on a hillside above the village and secures her a job at the small library. When Lucius Harney, a young architect visiting to study old buildings, begins to sketch the area, Charity is drawn into companionship that opens the countryside and her imagination in equal measure. The close third-person voice is lucid and unsentimental, moving through brisk scenes and exact description, while the tone balances rapture with foreboding and keeps the narrative taut without overstatement.
Wharton explores the peril and promise of sexual awakening under the pressure of social surveillance, showing how desire becomes inseparable from questions of status, money, and legitimacy. The novel considers the power dynamics embedded in guardianship and mentorship, and it probes the ways a young woman’s origins can be used to define her horizons. At the same time, it measures the moral elasticity of a community that prizes respectability while tolerating quiet cruelties. The push and pull between self-assertion and belonging animates every choice, rendering freedom not as an abstract ideal but as a negotiated space shaped by gender, class, and place.
Summer earns its title formally as well as figuratively: the heat, glare, and sudden storms structure the book’s rhythm, and the countryside’s meadows, ridges, and back roads register emotional weather with exacting restraint. Wharton’s prose is spare yet radiant, attentive to gesture and silence, and alert to the telling detail—a doorway, a train platform, a sketchbook of old houses—that reveals how history inhabits the present. Through the figure of an architect cataloging buildings, the novel meditates on what can be preserved and what inevitably changes, inviting readers to notice how structures, both literal and social, frame and sometimes foreclose human possibility.
Its questions remain urgent. The book examines consent amid unequal power, the vulnerabilities of youth in relationships marked by age or status differences, and the way institutions—legal, educational, and familial—mediate a young woman’s choices. It depicts class immobility and the stigmas attached to rural poverty, but also the magnetic pull of culture and opportunity concentrated elsewhere. Readers will recognize the workings of a reputation economy, where gossip functions like a networked surveillance system and where identity is negotiated publicly and privately. In tracing the costs of self-definition, Summer speaks to ongoing debates about autonomy, caretaking, and the boundaries of community responsibility.
As an achievement in American realism, Summer distills Wharton’s lifelong interest in how social arrangements shape intimate life, and it stands among her most daring portraits of a young woman thinking and feeling her way into adulthood. The novel’s brevity intensifies its ethical questions and its swift, clear scenes reward attentive reading. Without resorting to sentimentality, it illuminates tenderness, compromise, and harm in intertwined ways, offering no easy resolutions while honoring the clarity of experience. For contemporary readers, it endures as a bracing study of choice under constraint and as a beautifully crafted narrative attuned to landscape, character, and consequence.
Synopsis
Edith Wharton’s Summer, published in 1917, is a short novel set in the rural New England village of North Dormer. It follows Charity Royall, a young woman raised in modest circumstances, as she confronts the limits of her world during one transformative season. The narrative moves with compressed intensity, focusing on daily routines, small-town hierarchies, and the arrival of forces that disturb them. Wharton frames personal awakening within the social codes and economic realities of a place defined by scarcity and reputation. Without melodrama, the book traces how a singular summer accelerates Charity’s sense of self, testing loyalties, ambitions, and the moral boundaries upheld by her community.
Charity, taken as a child from the nearby Mountain and placed in the household of Lawyer Royall, works as the village librarian. Her education is piecemeal, her prospects narrow, and her independence constrained by gratitude and dependence. The library’s thin collection and the dusty main street encapsulate her frustration with what North Dormer offers. Royall’s guardianship, at once protective and possessive, shapes the rules of her life, including whom she may see and where she may go. Wharton conveys Charity’s impatience with the town’s stagnation while acknowledging the precariousness of a young woman living under the scrutiny of neighbors and the power of a single benefactor.
A visitor changes the tempo of Charity’s days. Lucius Harney, a young man traveling through the region to study and sketch its older houses, appears at the library seeking information. His curiosity about architecture and landscape opens a different lens onto the familiar. Charity, engaged as a guide and assistant, discovers in his company new routes outside the village and new ways of looking. The errands and research they share, modest in themselves, introduce a widening horizon. Wharton uses their collaboration to chart the subtle movement from formality to intimacy, and from observation to desire, with the summer sun intensifying each encounter.
As Charity spends more time escorting Harney to remote roads and weathered farmsteads, the season’s warmth heightens her awareness of feeling and possibility. Their conversations mix local lore with glimpses of a broader cultural world, emphasizing the distance between North Dormer and places where taste, work, and ambition align differently. Harney’s outsider sophistication fascinates Charity, but also exposes the invisible boundaries of class and education surrounding her. Wharton keeps the focus on gesture and atmosphere—how a borrowed book, a shared ride, or a hillside view can imply a future—while letting the town’s vigilant eyes and unspoken rules tighten around the pair.
Lawyer Royall’s presence, steady yet unpredictable, complicates Charity’s pursuit of autonomy. He occupies multiple positions—guardian, employer, and community figure—granting permissions that he also withdraws. His disapproval of Charity’s growing attachment intersects with his own loneliness and pride, producing confrontations that ripple into public knowledge. Scenes at the house they share reveal a household without clear boundaries, where protection can shade into control. Wharton neither vilifies nor excuses Royall; she shows how authority in a small town is personal as well as legal, and how a man’s compromised dignity can become a force that bears down on a young woman’s choices.
Against this triangle of influence, Charity’s origins on the Mountain press toward the surface. The Mountain, a nearby highland settlement marked by poverty and rough survival, stands as both birthplace and threat to her fragile status in North Dormer. Seeking answers and asserting independence, Charity ventures toward that terrain and encounters the stark material conditions that shaped her early years. The trip sharpens her self-understanding, revealing what she wishes to escape and what still claims her. Wharton uses the contrast between the village and the Mountain to explore inherited stigma, the pull of kinship, and the moral boundary between pity and belonging.
A journey to the larger town of Nettleton dramatizes the allure and hazards of a wider world. Amid summer festivities and crowds, Charity experiences a rush of freedom: public spaces where she is anonymous, amusements that suggest a life beyond strict surveillance. Yet this same anonymity proves unstable. Chance meetings and interferences expose how quickly reputation can be altered, and how authority figures can reassert control outside their home territory. The episode intensifies tensions among Charity, Harney, and Royall, bringing private emotions into a public arena. It also clarifies the cost of defying local norms, sharpening Charity’s awareness of risk and consequence.
Through late summer, possibilities narrow even as feelings deepen. Practical constraints—money, work, kin obligations, and the social meanings of class—crowd the idealism of first attraction. Harney’s itinerant project and external commitments complicate any simple future he and Charity might imagine. Gossip in North Dormer grows, and Charity recognizes that decisions cannot be deferred. She weighs escape against security, loyalty against self-preservation. Attempts to chart an independent path confront the realities of employment, shelter, and the rights others claim over her. Wharton keeps the narrative close to Charity’s evolving judgment, emphasizing how maturity arrives through choices no one has fully prepared her to make.
