#19 (cbriv-2012) "Summer" by Edith Wharton

I am a big fan of Edith Wharton, even when her characters are driving me crazy. Her writing is beautiful, insightful and relatable--although it was written almost 100 years ago. I think it was another cannonball reviewer who recommended Summer (1917) to me and I've just now finally gotten around to reading it.

Summer revolves around Charity Royall, a young woman bored by her small-town, Massachusetts life and lack of opportunities. She yearns for something more but her ignorance and lack of options holds her back. She resents and is disgusted by her guardian, Mr. Royall, the town attorney, who wants to marry her. Charity is a fascinating character who is often selfish, ignorant, and at times both snobbish and concerned with her own inadequacy. Charity meets Lucius Harney when he comes visiting, and she is immediately swept away by his intelligence, elegance, and symbol of things she's looking for in life.

What follows is one of the most realistic love stories I have ever read. SPOILER? Times and circumstances have changed, but as far as feelings go, Wharton could have been talking about the first guy I ever fell for. "Her heart was ravaged by life's cruelest discovery: the first creature who had come toward her out of the wilderness had brought her anguish instead of joy." Wharton's novel also felt remarkably modern in the way it frankly addressed sex and even abortion.

CONTINUED SPOILERS
"In a flash they had shown her the bare reality of her situation. Behind the frail screen of her lover's caresses was the whole inscrutable mystery of his life: his relations with other people--with other women--his opinions, his prejudices, his principles, the net of influences and interests and ambitions in which every  man's life is entangled."

I was haunted by the end of the book. On the one hand, Mr. Royall doesn't hold any grudges, treats Charity kindly, and saves her from a much worse life. On the other hand, Mr. Royall is a dirty old man and everything that Charity wanted to get away from. She was never able to make any choices about her own life. Her relationship with Lucius felt like predetermined fate--not something that she could possibly have resisted, leaving her with no choice at the end of the novel except for that which disgusted her at the beginning. "Even the feeling of the ring on her hand had not brought her this sharp sense of the irretrievable. For an instant the old impulse of flight swept through her; but it was only the lift of a broken wing. She heard the door open behind her, and Mr. Royall came in."