Edith Wharton, Summer

Rita Bode (Trent University)

Ed. by Stephen E. Meats, Pittsburg State University
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.3: American (US) Writing and Culture: The Early Twentieth-century , 1900-1945.
Vol. editors: Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Dale Enggass (University of Utah), Matthew Hofer (University of New Mexico), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University), Justin Parks (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway), Nick Selby (University of East Anglia)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1917

Places

United States (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Novella

Resources

Writing to a friend on December 21, 1916, Edith Wharton made some telling remarks about the “shortish novel” on which she was working. Designating it “as the Hot Ethan”, she explains that it is set “in the neighbourhood of Windsor Mountain”, with “the time being summer which is also the title of the book”, and she adds, “I don’t know how on earth the thing got itself written in the scramble & scuffle of my present life: but it did” (Letters 385). As in the earlier Ethan Frome of 1911, Wharton in Summer turns again to the New England countryside of her Massachusetts home, The Mount, to examine the strained and barren lives of both its small town inhabitants and the mountain people of the B…

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3283 words

Citation: Bode, Rita. "Summer". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 25 August 2014 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=1797, accessed 22 November 2024.]

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