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Title: Summer by Edith Wharton ISBN: 0-553-21422-5 Publisher: Bantam Books Pub. Date: 01 August, 1993 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $4.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.53 (19 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Just like real life
Comment: Charity Royall is a girl from a small town who spends her days face down in the grass dreaming. Enter Lucius Harney, artistic, city guy who for a few months sweeps Charity off of her feet, rescuing her from small town life in North Dormer. Charity turns out to be little more than a side dish for Harney who goes on to marry Ms Balch; Charity is left depressed, pregnant and forced to marry the middle-age man who raised her, to save her name. I love all things Wharton so I may be a bit biased but I disagree that the ending was poor. It's pretty standard that Wharton's books do not have a happy ending; the characters have an amazing, brief love affair, but in the end, there is always some impediment, as in Ethan Frome and The Age of Innocence. For the realists out there, read this book; those who must have a happy ending, stick to fairytales!
Rating: 4
Summary: A butterfly on the wheel
Comment: Like _House of Mirth, Edith Wharton's 1917 short novel _Summer _ shows a relatively aware young woman being ground up by social convention. Wharton is so linked with Henry James that no one seems to have noticed the extent to which she was a late naturalist, chronicled inexorable destruction. An argument could be made that Charity is rescued from her hereditary fate up in the mountains (the Berkshires) and that the prime upholder of convention takes pity on her plight, but _Summer_ is close to _Ethan Frome_ in more than a New England location. More pragmatic than some of those confronted with destruction in other Wharton works, Charity makes the best of her very limited options, but happiness is more fleeting than a New England summer is.
The lack of female solidarity in _Summer_ is especially striking. Lily Bart had one devoted female friend. Charity has none, and the professional woman she turns to is far and away the most vicious character in the book.
Most of the book is about the blooming of a love crossing social boundaries that I find tedious. Others, including, I think Wharton herself, enjoyed chronicling Charity's first experience of love with an out-of-towner whose life and commitments are elsewhere, but for me it is the portrait of small-town busybodies and the eventual narrow corner into which Charity paints herself (with the help of social hypocrisy and her lack of education or any marketable skills ) that are interesting.
Susan Minot's introduction is helpful in placing the book within the course of Edith Wharton's life. A particularly important continuity across Wharton's work Minot observes is that "Wharton's heroines are not hapless victims; they understand their helplessness." I am not convinced that this enables them to keep their dignity, but the awareness of their plight and the unreasonability of social judgments heightens the tragedies (in contrast to Stephen Crane's _Maggie_ to take one example).
Rating: 5
Summary: An Affair with Life
Comment: Concise, well-developed, and almost painfully beautifully written, "Summer" chronicles a country girl's affair with a cultured city sophisticate. At first closed off and silently rebellious against her lot, Wharton eloquently follows Charity's emotional, intellectual, and sexual awakening in a time and place when such personal and intimate exploration was unknown.
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Title: The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton, Diane Johnson ISBN: 0375758070 Publisher: Modern Library Pub. Date: 09 October, 2001 List Price(USD): $11.95 |
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Title: The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton ISBN: 0451527569 Publisher: New American Library Pub. Date: 01 February, 2000 List Price(USD): $4.95 |
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Title: Old New York by Edith Wharton ISBN: 0020383142 Publisher: Scribner Book Company Pub. Date: 01 March, 1995 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton ISBN: 0375753206 Publisher: Modern Library Pub. Date: 01 April, 1999 List Price(USD): $9.95 |
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Title: Sanctuary by Edith Wharton ISBN: 0812217926 Publisher: Pine Street Books Pub. Date: 01 November, 2001 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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