Born Edith Newbold Jones into a society known as “Old New York” at a time when women were discouraged from achieving anything beyond a proper marriage, Edith Wharton (1862-1937) broke through these constraints to become one of America’s greatest writers. She was a close friend of Henry James, who in turn was a valued literary adviser and the saying “keeping up with the Joneses” was said to refer to her father’s family. 
The author of ‘The Age of Innocence’, ‘Ethan Frome’ and ‘The House of Mirth’, she wrote over 40 books in 40 years, including authoritative works on architecture, gardens, interior design, and travel. Essentially self-educated, she was the first woman awarded:
- the Pulitzer Prize for Literature
- an honorary Doctorate of Letters from Yale University
- full membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters
Edith Wharton, The Mount Estate and Gardens website
Summer is a novella published in 1917 and was written by Wharton as a companion piece to her earlier novel ‘Ethan Frome’. Referred to by Wharton as her “hot Ethan”, it again explored three characters caught between their desires and society’s constraints.
Eighteen-year-old Charity lives in the remote village of North Dormer with her guardian, Lawyer Royall, but she has dreams that extend beyond the confines of her current home and her past as the child from the Mountain. 
“Charity yearns for a fuller life than the one she lives in her small town, but social restrictions and a certain weakness of character prevent her from realizing her dreams. One of the first American literary novels to deal frankly with a young woman’s sexual awakening, Summer begins with a chance encounter, has a passionate affair at its center, and ends with a wedding. In this bare outline, Summer appears similar to hundreds of “sentimental” novels of the period, but critics agree that Wharton’s depth of feeling and rich prose have turned a conventional plot into art. The novel’s contemporary reviewers argued heatedly over the meaning of the wedding, and the question continued to interest critics in the twenty-first century.”
E-notes ‘Summer’
Summer and ‘Ethan Frome’ stand apart from her other novels, as they examine lower class rural Massachusetts and people with little money, education or privelege, as opposed to the upper class society of New York displayed in ‘The Age of Innocence’ and ‘The House of Mirth’. She wrote Summer in six weeks in the spring of 1916, whilst she was in France undertaking relief work for the war and it became one of her most well regarded works.
