Considered by some to be her finest work, Edith Whartons Summer created a sensation when first published in 1917, as it was one of the first novels to deal honestly with a young womans sexual awakening. Seventeen-year-old Charity Royall is desperate to escape life with her hard-drinking adoptive father. Their isolated village stifles her, and his behavior increasingly disturbs her. When a young city architect Lucius Harney visits for the summer, it offers Charity the chance to break free. But as they embark on an intense affair, will it bring her another kind of trap? Praised for its realism and honesty by such writers as Joseph Conrad and Henry James and compared to Flauberts Madame Bovary, Summer remains as fresh and powerful a novel today as when it was first written.