Resumen
Resumen de Verano
Para quién es
For readers who love closely observed novels about love, class and the pressure of small places, and stories of young women seeking freedom. It is also a good way into Wharton.
De qué trata este libro
Summer is a short novel by Edith Wharton, published in 1917. It is set in North Dormer, a poor and sleepy village in the hills of western New England. Wharton wrote it while she lived in France during the First World War. She once described it as a companion to her winter story Ethan Frome, the same bleak country seen under heat and sun.
The heroine is Charity Royall, a young woman of eighteen who is bored, proud and hungry for life. She has a job in the village library and a guardian she does not trust. Then a stranger arrives, and one season changes what she wants and what she knows about herself. You get a love story, a portrait of a small community, and a plain look at what a young woman could and could not choose in those years. Let us begin with the girl herself and the place she is desperate to leave.
En este resumen
- 1Charity is restless in a dying villageFree
- 2A young architect brings the wider world
- 3Love grows in the long warm days
- 4Mr. Royall stands in the way
- 5The story asks what a girl may choose
- 6Wharton tells it through seasons and land
Idea clave 1 de 6
Charity is restless in a dying village
The story opens on a June day in North Dormer. Charity Royall steps out of the house of Lawyer Royall, the man who raised her, and looks over a village that seems to have stopped. The houses are shabby, the young people have left, and nothing happens. Charity works part time in the library, which belongs to the old Hatchard family and is rarely visited.
She is bright, but she has little schooling and few ways to use her mind. Her bitterness has a source. As a small child she was brought down from the Mountain, a rough settlement above the village where poor and lawless people live. Lawyer Royall and his late wife took her in and gave her a home and a name. Charity feels this as a debt she never agreed to, and she is ashamed of where she came from.
Wharton makes the village feel like a trap. The older people are narrow and watchful, and the few young men are dull. Charity looks at the hills and the empty road and thinks there must be something beyond them. Her longing is not for anything she can name. It is simply the wish to be somewhere else and to be someone else.
The household adds to the strain. Mr. Royall is a lawyer, a widower and a man of some standing in the village, but he drinks and is moody. He and Charity speak to each other with a cold, wary politeness. An uneasy feeling hangs over the house from the start, and the reader senses that Charity will not be able to stay on as she is.
That’s 1 of 6 key points.
The rest of the summary, written and spoken, and the whole book: free to start.
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Questions about Verano
What is Summer by Edith Wharton about?
It tells of Charity Royall, a young woman in a poor New England village, and her love affair with a visiting architect over one summer. It looks at desire, class, shame and the limits placed on women.
Why did Edith Wharton call Summer the hot Ethan Frome?
She saw it as a companion to Ethan Frome. Both are set in the bleak hill country of New England, but Summer is warm and sensual where Ethan Frome is cold and snowbound.
Who is Lawyer Royall in Summer?
He is Charity's guardian, a lawyer and widower in North Dormer who brought her down from the Mountain as a child. He is stern, troubled and more complicated than he first looks.
What is the Mountain in Summer?
The Mountain is a rough, lawless settlement above North Dormer where Charity was born. She is ashamed of it, and it stands for the poverty and freedom that she tries to leave behind.
Is Summer by Edith Wharton hard to read?
No. It is short, with clear prose and a simple plot. The language is direct, so most readers can finish it in a few sittings.