Summer

Considered by some to be her finest work, Edith Wharton’s <b>Summer</b> created a sensation when first published in 1917, as it was one of the first novels to deal honestly with a young woman’s sexual awakening.<br><br><b>Summer</b> is the story of Charity Royall, a child of mountain moonshiners adopted by a family in a poor New England town, who has a passionate love affair with Lucius Harney, an educated man from the city. Wharton broke the conventions of women’s romantic fiction by making Charity a thoroughly independent modern woman—in touch with her emotions and sexuality, yet kept from love and the larger world she craves by the overwhelming pressures of heredity and society.<br><br>Praised for its realism and honesty by such writers as Joseph Conrad and Henry James and compared to Flaubert’s <b>Madame Bovary</b><i>, </i><b>Summer</b> remains as fresh and powerful a novel today as when it was first written.