Novella: Summer

Setting and context

Set in the fictitious New England hill town of North Dormer, "Summer" follows the compressed, intense months of a young woman's coming-of-age. The novel exploits the seasonal heat and rural confinement to contrast the narrow moral geography of a small town with the seductive, cosmopolitan freedom represented by an outsider. Edith Wharton uses the landscape, summer skies, brooks, and the town's tight social web, as both backdrop and pressure cooker for the central drama.
Written in 1917, the novella reverses Wharton's usual focus on high society to explore an underclass rarely given a full moral voice in her work. The provincial setting sharpens questions of class, gender, and sexual autonomy, exposing how social assumptions and physical isolation shape and ultimately limit a young woman's choices.

Main characters

Charity Royall is the protagonist, a ward of the town's lawyer, raised in a household that is respectable in appearance but emotionally stunted. She is intelligent, curious, and at once vulnerable and fiercely desirous of a life beyond the town's bounds. Her adolescence has been arrested by duty, dependence, and the closed horizons of North Dormer.
Lucius Harney is the outsider who arrives from the city: an architect and amateur aesthete whose cultivated manner and city-bred sensibilities starkly contrast with local life. His attentions awaken Charity's sexual and imaginative life. The lawyer who acts as Charity's guardian is a complex, possessive figure whose moral authority and private desires complicate Charity's attempts at freedom and exert a lasting force on the story's outcome.

Plot overview

Charity's sheltered existence changes when Lucius Harney comes to North Dormer for the summer. Their meetings begin as a flirtation and develop into a passionate affair that feels like an initiation into adulthood for Charity. Lucius opens her mind to art, books, and a sense of possibility beyond her small town, and in turn Charity offers him the directness and warmth of a life he finds both novel and intoxicating.
As the summer progresses, the relationship reveals sharp class and cultural differences. Lucius, though sincerely attracted, ultimately cannot commit to uprooting his comfortable city life for Charity's uncertain future. His departure and the collapse of the intimacy between them leave Charity exposed to the town's moral scrutiny and to the complicated attentions of her guardian. The novel traces her disillusionment and the permanent alteration of her prospects once the illusion of escape has been shattered.

Themes and symbolism

Summer explores the clash between desire and social constraint, showing how passion can awaken a woman's selfhood yet also become the source of her undoing when social structures refuse to accommodate her. The natural imagery of the season, heat, storms, sudden blooms, mirrors the intensity and ephemerality of Charity's affair and underscores the way external forces curtail personal freedom.
Class and place function as crucial symbolic forces: the town represents inertia and moral surveillance, the city stands for culture and possibility, and the gulf between them underlines how social mobility for women is not merely a matter of will but of structural possibility. The lawyer's paternalism and the town's gossip act as institutionalized obstacles, making Charity's tragic outcome feel less like personal failure than the result of a society that punishes female desire.

Tone and legacy

Wharton's tone is both empathetic and unsparing. She renders Charity with compassion while exposing the unforgiving social mechanics that produce the novella's tragic conclusion. The prose combines precise psychological observation with evocative natural description, creating an atmosphere of inevitable melancholy.
Although not as widely known as Wharton's major novels, "Summer" stands out for its frank treatment of female sexuality and its critique of small-town morality. Its unsettling ending and moral complexity have made it a provocative and influential work for readers interested in gender, class, and the costs of wanting more than one's social station allows.