Summer - Softcover

Considered by some to be her finest work, Edith Wharton's Summer created a sensation when first published in 1917, as it was one of the first novels to deal honestly with a young woman's sexual awakening. Summer is the story of proud and independent Charity Royall, a child of mountain moonshiners adopted by a family in a poor New England town, who has a passionate love affair with Lucius Harney, an educated young man from the city. Wharton broke the conventions of woman's romantic fiction by making Charity a thoroughly contemporary woman--in touch with her feelings and sexuality, yet kept from love and the larger world she craves by the overwhelming pressures of environment and heredity. Praised for its realism and candor by such writers as Joseph Conrad and Henry James and compared to Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Summer was one of Wharton's personal favorites of all her novels and remains as fresh and relevant today as when it was first written.

America's most famous woman of letters, and the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize, Edith Wharton was born into one of the last "leisured class" families in New York City, as she put it, in 1862. Educated privately, she was married to Edward Wharton in 1885, and for the next few years, they spent their time in the high society of Newport (Rhode Island), then Lenox (Massachusetts) and Europe. It was in Europe that Wharton first met Henry James, who was to have a profound and lasting influence on her life and work. Wharton's first published book was a work of nonfiction, in collaboration with Ogden Codman, "The Decoration of Houses" (1897), but from early on, her marriage had been a source of distress, and she was advised by her doctor to write fiction to relieve her nervous tension. Wharton's first short stories appeared in "Scribner's Magazine, " and though she published several volumes of fiction around the turn of the century, including "The Greater Inclination" (1899), "The Touchstone" (1900), "Crucial Instances" (1901), "The Valley of Decision" (1902), "Sanctuary" (1903), and "The Descent of Man and Other Stories" (1904), it wasn't until 1905, with the publication of the bestselling "The House of Mirth, " that she was recognized as one of the most important novelists of her time for her keen social insight and subtle sense of satire. In 1906, Wharton visited Paris, which inspired "Madame de Treymes" (1907), and she made her home there in 1907, finally divorcing her husband in 1912. The years before the outbreak of World War I represent the core of her artistic achievement, when "Ethan Frome" (1911), "The Reef" (1912), and "The Custom of the Country" (1913) were published. During the war, she remained in France organizing relief for Belgian refugees, for which she was later awarded the Legion of Honor. She also wrote two novels about the war, "The Marne" (1918) and "A Son at the Front" (1923), and continued, in France, to write about New England and the Newport society she had known so well in "Summer" (1917), the companion to "Ethan Frome, " and "The Age of Innocence" (1920), for which she won the Pulitzer Prize. Wharton died in France in 1937. Her other works include "Old New York" (1924), "The Mother's Recompense" (1925), "The Writing of Fiction" (1925), "The Children" (1928), "Hudson River Bracketed" (1929), and her autobiography, "A Backward Glance" (1934).

Raver is a versatile, classically trained actor who has made numerous stage appearances in New York, Los Angeles, and regional theaters around the country.