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** spoiler alert ** I had the pleasure of reading this short novel for the second time this week after many years. As a Wharton admirer -- she is highly on my list of literary crushes (although if The House of Mirth is any indication, I can't say she'd want much to do with a middle-class Jew whose grandmother did piece work) --please always take my devotion with a few grains of salt. That being said, I was surprised at how provocative and modern the novel seemed on this second visit, not only a commentary on early 20th century social constrictions, but also a trenchant reflection on adolescence and love. (Caveat: Summer is far different in sensibility from Wharton's urban novels like The Age of Innocence and The Custom of the Country.)

I will trust most readers of this review are already familiar with the basics of the plot: 18-year-old Charity Royall of North Dormer, Massachusetts, pursues an ill-fated romance with visiting illustrator and architect Lucius Harney. Meanwhile, she parries unwanted matrimonial advances from Lawyer Royall, who has raised her since childhood, but ultimately Harney jilts her and she acquiesces to a marriage with Royall. What I would like to suggest -- as unpopular as this non-conventional reading may sound in the era of MeToo and "Cat Person" -- is that Lawyer Royall is a far richer, complex and more sympathetic character than he is generally portrayed to be. That is not to say he is without serious flaws: the moment where he drunkenly tries to seduce his ward, the episode where he calls her a whore on the dock, possibly even his wish to marry a teenager he has raised from age five. Okay, points made. (I suspect he is closer to 45 than 60, but still....)
HOWEVER: Unlike Harney or Charity or anybody else in the novel, Lawyer Royall is the only character who repeatedly and consistently displays a capacity altruism, self-sacrifice and meaningful love. This occurs most notably when he offers to retrieve Harney and use his legal knowledge to compel the architect to marry Charity even though this means losing the woman he professes to love. (I find this offer sincere and the suggestion that it might be a seduction strategy rather unconvincing.) Similarly, he tracks down Charity after her ultimate "disgrace" and marries her, knowing that he will be raising another man's child--and does not even raise the issue with her. I found the moment when he sleeps on the chair in the hotel during the first night of their marriage very sad, but it certainly seems he has no intention of forcing himself on Charity in the future, even though they are legally married (which was probably a reader's expectation in that epoch). Key to all of this, of course, is that throughout most of the novel, as by her own assessment, the power dynamic in their relationship favors Charity, not Lawyer Royall. Obvious, by contemporary standards, his conduct is problematic -- but by the standards of 1917, he proves himself generous and selfless in a way Harney certainly never does, and we are also led to believe that the other men in the town generally do not. (Harney is more or less a foil, one of literature's many two-timing louts who play off their good looks and money.)

Why Royall wants to marry Charity is itself a puzzle. She is obviously beautiful, and intelligent (if uneducated), as well as tempestuous, but she's not particularly kind -- and even excusing her early misfortune growing up "on the mountain," she can prove lazy (letting the library in her charge decay), judgmental (scorning Julia Hawkes, who has been ostracized for an unwed pregnancy) and cruel (as she often is to Royall.) She also has her redeeming moments, as when she writes to Harney urging him to stick to his promise to marry Annabel Balch, but as a heroine, she is rather troublesome, if not outright infuriating. Of course, Wharton meant her to be -- not as an indictment of Charity herself, but an indictment of the limitations her society placed upon women of her age -- but she proves much less compelling (in the sense of rooting for her, not in the sense of enjoying reading about her), to my tastes, than Lily Bart or Ellen Olenska or even Mattie Silver in Ethan Frome.

In any case, other readers should feel free to disagree with me. But they should read this masterful book, because it's a highly engaging and thought-provoking gem that transcends time and place.

(PS: If you're out there somewhere, Edith, and want to dine, my calendar is wide open....)