While vacationing this past June at the Outer Banks, I stopped one afternoon at a small bookstore in the sleepy coastal town of Buxton. After navigating past romance, mystery, and local fiction to the classics corner (Moby-Dick and the Odyssey make the best beach reading), I was arrested by the cover of a slim, Oxford World’s Classics paperback: A young woman, perched alone atop a mountain wearing a white dress that stands in sharp relief against a vast expanse of blue sky, leans forward with her elbows thrust out like wings as she clasps her sunhat to her face. Her lips are slightly parted and her eyes gaze heavenward in a classic posture of ecstasy.
The book, Edith Wharton’s short novel Summer, was originally published 100 summers ago. Wharton wrote it in spurts while she did relief work and fundraising in France during the war. Though she ranked the book as one of her own favorites, Summer has never enjoyed as much popularity as her other New England story, Ethan Frome (1911), her second novel The House of Mirth (1905), or her Pulitzer Prize-winning The Age of Innocence (1920).
