Summer: Classic Literary Fiction (Annotated)

Unique Elements Detailed 20th Century Historical TimelineExperience this beautiful, timeless tale, where every page unfolds into a world of adventure and wonder.Synopsis: Summer by American author Edith Wharton created a huge sensation upon its 1917 publication due to Wharton’s candid depiction of the subject matter.The story tells of a young woman from a modest background who encounters a driven city man, leading to a passionate romance. Charity Royall, despite her strong sense of self, confidence, and integrity, is haunted by her past and feels overshadowed by her intense relationship with the cultured and well-educated Lucius Harney.Excerpt: ‘In the course of that incredible day Charity Royall had, for the first and only time, experienced railway-travel, looked into shops with plate-glass fronts, tasted cocoanut pie, sat in a theatre, and listened to a gentleman saying unintelligible things before pictures that she would have enjoyed looking at if his explanations had not prevented her from understanding them. This initiation had shown her that North Dormer was a small place, and developed in her a thirst for information that her position as custodian of the village library had previously failed to excite. For a month or two she dipped feverishly and disconnectedly into the dusty volumes of the Hatchard Memorial Library; then the impression of Nettleton began to fade, and she found it easier to take North Dormer as the norm of the universe than to go on reading.The sight of the stranger once more revived memories of Nettleton, and North Dormer shrank to its real size. As she looked up and down it, from lawyer Royall's faded red house at one end to the white church at the other, she pitilessly took its measure. There it lay, a weather-beaten sunburnt village of the hills, abandoned of men, left apart by railway, trolley, telegraph, and all the forces that link life to life in modern communities. It had no shops, no theatres, no lectures, no “business block”; only a church that was opened every other Sunday if the state of the roads permitted, and a library for which no new books had been bought for twenty years, and where the old ones mouldered undisturbed on the damp shelves. Yet Charity Royall had always been told that she ought to consider it a privilege that her lot had been cast in North Dormer. She knew that, compared to the place she had come from, North Dormer represented all the blessings of the most refined civilization. Everyone in the village had told her so ever since she had been brought there as a child. Even old Miss Hatchard had said to her, on a terrible occasion in her life: “My child, you must never cease to remember that it was Mr. Royall who brought you down from the Mountain.”’A Beautiful Reprint At Ginger Classics, we take every step possible to ensure that the original integrity of this book has been upheld to its highest standard. This means that the texts in this story are unedited and unchanged from the original author's publication, preserving its earliest form for your enjoyment.