This is another by Edith Wharton (1862-1937), to follow The Touchstone and The Glimpses of the Moon, which I read earlier in the year. This one was first published in 1917.

I listened to the audio-version, which was beautifully read by Grace Conlin.

Summer, at its core, tells an old story. Lower-class, uneducated, slightly rough girl (Charity) meets higher-class, professional, genteel boy (Lucius). They like each other. But it's the early 1900s, and it's small-town -- smallest-town -- America. So, of course, nothing can come of it. It's a summer romance that will wither with the cold autumn winds of reality.

The setting is North Dormer, Massachusetts, and Charity is bored to death by the little place. "How I hate everything!" are the first words we hear from her. Meeting the splendid Lucius, then, appears to open up all kinds of doors, from the discovery of her sexuality to the prospect of exploring the wider world.

Looming in the background of the story, literally, is "the Mountain". This community of ne'er-do-wells, steeped in poverty, and shunned by the folks on the plain, is Charity's highly dubious point of origin. She was rescued as a small child by Lawyer Royall and his wife, and brought up under their supervision. But Mrs Royall dies, and Lawyer Royall starts to get different ideas about the now-grown-up Charity. She faces down a midnight appearance at her bedroom door, and a subsequent, more sober proposal of marriage. She's feisty, and very much in control. We don't fear for her safety. But he's there in the background, all through the romance with Lucius, with attitudes ranging from quietly negative predictions about the outcome, to fierce, drunken insults.



Royall is irksome and often out-of-order, but he is right about Charity's relationship... Lucius is secretly committed to another woman. And Charity -- because she is proud, stubborn, and fiercely independent -- releases him, urging him to do the right thing by his same-class fiancee.

This magnanimous gesture, however, comes before she knows she's expecting his baby... And by the end, Charity is really out of options. Having told Lucius he's a free man, she doesn't want to renege, and force his hand (she has seen the kind of marriage that results from that stratagem). She knows where she could get an abortion, but she can't bring herself to do that to her child. She tries fleeing back to the Mountain, but her mother has just died, and a brief overnight spell is sufficient to show her that joining this poverty-stricken community will benefit neither them nor her baby.

And into the breach springs Lawyer Royall. Having been the Cassandra all the way through, he now doesn't even need to say, "I told you so." He offers marriage again, and Charity accepts. Wharton doesn't paint him at this point as a totally black-hearted monster. Once married, he behaves respectfully and kindly; he genuinely tries to spare Charity's feelings. But you suspect his new-found niceness derives to a large extent from Charity's utter powerlessness. And, ultimately, he is absolutely not what this young girl hoped for and dreamed of.

Carol Wershoven defends the marriage, pointing out that both Charity and Lawyer Royall are rebels, ill at ease in the constraints of North Dormer life. They both fantasize about escape, and have to buckle down and recognize the futility of their fantasies. At the Old Home Week festivity that the town organizes, Lawyer Royall uses his role as keynote speaker to appeal for potential returnees to look things in the face: "Even if you come back against your will -- and thinking it's all a bitter mistake of Fate or Providence -- you must try to make the best of it, and to make the best of your old town..." For both Charity and Royall, says Wershoven, the "return" represents the rejection of illusions, a "return to one's self, an acceptance of one's self and of one's limitations". The marriage with which the book closes is "a coming home to a union built together out of loneliness and pain and shame, and dedicated to working together, as equals, for good".

I'm not sure Wharton wants us to feel so complacent about the ending, though. Yes, there is generosity in Royall's actions, and Charity grudgingly admits his possession of finer qualities ("I guess you're good too"). But it's not that long since she was telling him she had always hated him... He has not always cut a noble figure in this narrative, and he has all the power in this relationship. Tellingly, it's a "cold autumn moonlight" that accompanies the newly-weds drive home. Summer has definitively gone.



All the time, the odds were stacked against Charity. Even she could never envisage herself as Lucius's wife. The differences in status were just too enormous. Yet, as always, the injustice cries out. As a reader, you're looking for ways that might lead to a happy ending, while all the while aware that such paths would be highly implausible.

Liz Boltz Ranfeld argues that the book "presents a feminist dilemma about agency: what happens when all of our options are bad?"

And indeed, marriage to Royall is presumably better than turning to sex work, like Julia Hawes, or taking her own life (we do worry a bit when, after the wedding, Charity stands alone in the hotel room, looking out of her fifth-floor window, conscious of the irretrievable nature of what she has done).

As Ranfeld says, Charity "is constantly forced to choose between a few terrible options. She never has the opportunity to choose between good outcomes."

Kayla Kibbe very perceptively points out that this is "a book about endings", and its poignancy derives from Wharton's ability to capture the beginning of the end -- "the moment we first realize something is over before it is, when we see the end coming and pretend we didn’t". Kibbe says she is obsessed by these "endings before the endings". As she explains: "These moments can strike anywhere at any time, and when they do, they are usually fatal. Nothing has happened, not yet, but somehow this is the end. Some illusion has fractured; soon it will shatter."

This is definitely the quality that lends Summer its grim inexorability and its haunting sadness.