Edith Wharton was fify-five years old when she wrote the novella 'Summer in 1917. She was a divorced woman living a sophisticated and cultured llfe in Paris, far from her native United States. A well-known author, she'd been publishing fiction since the turn of the century with a rigorous output of a book nearly every year. But the war in France curtailed her writing, and following The Custom of the Country (1913), she devoted her energies to the war effort. Her involvement was characteristically enthusiastic and productive. She employed seamstresses to sew for soldiers, established day care centers, and arranged placement for refugees. She visited the front lines and toured hospitals, collecting her impressions in a series of articles, Fighting France, and was instrumental in raising money for war-related causes.

Considered by Some to be her finest work,Edith Wharton's Summer created a sensation when first published in t917, as it was one of the first novels to deal honestly with a young woman's sexual awakening.Summer is the story of proud and independent Charity Royall, a child of mountain moonshiners adopted by a family in a poor New England town, who has a passionate love affair with Lucius Harney, an educated young man from the city. Wharton broke the conventions of women's romantic fiction by making Charity a thoroughly contemporary woman--in touch with her feelings and sexuality, yet kept from love and the larger world she craves by the overwhelming pressures of environment and heredity.

Praised for its realism and candor by such writers as Joseph Conrad and Henry James and compared to Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Summer was ohe of Wharton's personal favorites of all her novels and remains as fresh and relevant today as when it was first written.