Edith Wharton 
Summer (Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading) 

One of Americas first novels to deal frankly with a young womans sexual awakening,
Summer shocked readers with its forthright exploration of desire and sexuality. Set in the Berkshire Mountains of Western Massachusetts, it tells the story of Charity Royall, a young New England woman of humble origins who meets and falls in love with the worldly Lucius Harney, an architect from the city. In evocative and descriptive prose, Edith Wharton conveys the ecstasy of Charitys first experience in sexual and romantic love, and pulls her heroine through the throes of loving a man who ultimately cannot choose her. Whartons tale elicits the passion and despair of all great but ill-fated love affairs and enthralls the contemporary reader with its pathos just as it did nearly one hundred years ago.

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Though best known for her novels of manners detailing upper-class New York society in works such as The House of Mirth (1905) and The Age of Innocence (1920), Edith Wharton was the prolific author of more than two dozen novels, story collections, essays, and poems. She was also a highly regarded tastemaker and author of nonfiction manuals such as The Decoration of Houses (1897), Italian Villas and Their Gardens (1904), and Italian Backgrounds (1905). Born in 1862 into the privileged, aristocratic milieu of Old New York and financially independent at twenty-one years old, Wharton came of age during what is commonly called the Gilded Age, and her life in many ways paralleled that of her wealthy but longing New York City characters.