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    A Study Guide for Edith Wharton's "Summer"
    A Study Guide for Edith Wharton's "Summer"
    A Study Guide for Edith Wharton's "Summer"
    Ebook40 pages29 minutes

    A Study Guide for Edith Wharton's "Summer"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Edith Wharton's "Summer," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateJun 14, 2016
    ISBN9781535834308
    A Study Guide for Edith Wharton's "Summer"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Edith Wharton's "Summer" - Gale

      1

      Summer

      Edith Wharton

      1917

      Introduction

      Summer, published in 1917, is one of only two novels the prolific writer Edith Wharton set in rural New England. Wharton, who was both critically acclaimed and a bestselling author, was perhaps better known in her lifetime for her many novels set in New York City among the wealthy elite. In this novel, however, the author's keen attention to detail is turned away from fashion and manners and city life and instead directed at the wonders of the natural world as they echo the changes felt by the central character, Charity Royall. Summer was only a moderate success when it first appeared, but when Wharton's work was rediscovered in the 1960s the novel found a new, larger, and more appreciative critical audience.

      Like the protagonist in Ethan Frome, Wharton's most widely read novel today, Charity yearns for a fuller life than the one she lives in her small town, but social restrictions and a certain weakness of character prevent her from realizing her dreams. One of the first American literary novels to deal frankly with a young woman's sexual awakening, Summer begins with a chance encounter, has a passionate affair at its center, and ends with a wedding. In this bare outline, Summer appears similar to hundreds of sentimental novels of the period, but critics agree that Wharton's depth of feeling and rich prose have turned a conventional plot into art. The novel's contemporary reviewers argued heatedly over the meaning of the wedding, and the question continued to interest critics in the twenty-first century.

      Author Biography

      Edith Wharton was born Edith Newbold Jones on January 24, 1862, in New York City. Her parents, wealthy members of New York's social elite, had a large home in Manhattan and another home in fashionable Newport, Rhode Island. From the time Edith was four until she was about ten, the family lived and traveled throughout Europe, avoiding the economic downturn that occurred in the United States after the Civil War. Edith developed an ear for languages and a taste for art and architecture that stayed with her for her entire life. When the family returned to New York, she did not attend formal school as her two brothers did but was encouraged by her father to study literature and philosophy on her own. Fluent in German, Italian, and French, she read widely. She also began to write, completing her first satirical fiction while she was only fourteen. Her

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