Summer by Edith Wharton

Charles Scribner & Sons, 1917; this edition Penguin Clothbound Classics, 2023

Why?

Cutting through Waterstones Piccadilly on my way to the tube after a couple of glasses of wine one hot evening this summer, I was distracted by a rather lovely front-of-store display of Penguin's highly collectible clothbound classics. I've not read nearly as much Edith Wharton as I should have done, and Summer seemed just the thing for the season. An irresistible combination of beautiful packaging and an appropriately summery title.

Enjoyment factor

Wharton is, of course, best known as a chronicler of Gilded Age New York society, with a particularly sharp eye for its conventions, hypocrisies and social hierarchies.

Summer, published in 1917, presents as something of a departure. Set in a small rural New England town, its heroine, Charity Royall, is a young woman rescued from destitution as a child and brought up by the town's lawyer, whose household offers her security but little affection or opportunity.

At heart, it's a beautifully written coming-of-age story. When Charity embarks on a summer romance with a sophisticated young man from New York, I found myself hoping that this would be the catalyst to lift her out of her stifling small-town existence and into a wider, more fulfilling world, whether with him or without him.

But this isn't Wharton's game. Instead, Charity's awakening to love and adulthood brings her face to face with the brutal realities of her circumstances. While her lover returns to New York, his glamorous life and his fiancée, Charity is left to deal with the consequences of their affair, which threaten to ruin her life for ever. What begins as an evocative summer romance gradually takes on a much darker edge, and the contrast between the promise of the season and the bleakness of its aftermath is stark.

It left me thinking ...

That Summer isn't really just a coming-of-age story at all. It's first and foremost a commentary on the extraordinary unfairness of women's lives at the time, when a pregnancy outside marriage could destroy a woman's future while the man responsible was free to carry on with his life, apparently without consequence or accountability.

The double standard is striking to a modern reader, particularly because it is presented not as an exceptional injustice but as an accepted fact of life. Charity's options are so desperately limited that the reader is left feeling both furious on her behalf and profoundly grateful for how far women's equality and independence have advanced in the intervening century.

I'm not hugely familiar with Wharton's writing, but for an author chiefly celebrated as a wry observer of High Society, this novel suggests a much deeper preoccupation with women's freedom and the constraints imposed upon them. This isn't a society belle being spurned or manoeuvred into an unsuitable marriage. It's a young woman with no money, no social standing, no family to fall back on and absolutely nowhere to turn.

And I guess that's what makes Summer so powerful. By stripping away the elaborate social structures and drawing rooms of the New York elite, Wharton exposes the underlying inequality in its starkest form. The rules may be different, but the imbalance of power between men and women is every bit as pronounced.

There seems to me to be a certain anger running beneath Wharton's elegant prose, an indignation at the injustice of a world in which a young man's romantic adventure can be a passing episode while a young woman's can determine the entire course of her life.

It's an unexpectedly uncompromising novel for something called Summer, and certainly not the uplifting seasonal read I had anticipated. But it has left me wanting to read more Edith Wharton.