![]() ![]() – Edith Wharton to her agent, Minnie Jones, April 16, 1923. Encompassing all is the cycling backdrop of New England seasons – spring into summer, fall into winter. The turning point comes among the crowds, fireworks and bunting of a feverish 4 th of July celebration. Enter Lucius Harney, a young architect from a different world.Ĭharity’s wary passage to adulthood unfolds through the bitter frustrations of her ambiguous relationship with Royall, and the lush, blossoming dream she shares with Lucius. Charity lives alone with Lawyer Royall – older, alcoholic, and obsessed with her beauty. The story is told through the eyes of Charity Royall – an orphan “brought down from the mountain” – now twenty and hungry for life beyond the dusty village library where she has found a job. In such a place, she explored her most daring themea woman’s awakening to her sexual needs. Yet she set this book far away from Paris in the same dark, rigid New England she used for Ethan Frome. ![]() ![]() The Pulitzer Prize-winning author declared Summer a personal favorite among her works, and liked to refer to it as the Hot Ethan. Set in a remote New England hilltown before the First World War, the novel is one of Edith Wharton’s greatest and most original works – the only one centered on an explicit physical relationship. In 1917, when Edith Wharton published Summer, she was living in a France steeped in the tragic realities of war. Edith Wharton the author of Ethan Frome and a peerless observer and chronicler of society completely shattered the standards of conventional love stories with this novels candor and realism. Summer is a dark romance of sexual awakening and the journey from desire to love. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |