This is romance gone wrong in the most realistic of ways. I couldn't help feeling, at the end, that though Charity ended up with someone who really loved her - still she lost something undefinable because she gave herself away to the first rush of strong emotion. Like many classic works, this one leaves a feeling of unsettledness. ( )

The most memorable characters in fiction are not perfect. It's the imperfections that get imprinted in your mind.

Charity Royall is full of imperfections. In fact, she's a walking imperfection.

All in all, it's a story of a young girl and a first love. It's nothing a million girls haven't or would not do.

Another thing that gets imprinted in your mind is a story that ends with uncertainty. We're left without knowing how Charity truly felt. Everything happened so fast for her, that I don't know if she had come to grips with it yet, and before I knew it, the book had come to an end.

This story is truly something to ponder. ( )

1385 Summer, by Edith Wharton (read 17 Apr 1976) This book is laid in western Massachusetts, as is Ethan Frome (which I read Sept 6, 1948) but does not have the impact I still vividly recall Ethan Frome had on me. The account of life the central female character had in her simpler earlier life seems grossly overdrawn, although supposedly it is not. I found the story distasteful, though Wharton writes like a great. But the story repels. ( )

The first thing that struck me when I finished this book was how times have changed. This was considered extremely provocative when it was published, yet Charity and Harney are only described kissing a few times, and are never described doing anything else. Charity strikes me as a very unhappy young woman, and even ungrateful. She lives with her much older (and yes, imperfect) guardian, and treats him with nothing but scorn throughout the entire story, even though he took her in and cared for her for almost her whole life without any obligation. He gets her the job she desires, and she treats it with scorn also, often abandoning it to lay in the fields for the afternoon. I can see that she is lost, but I found little reason to want her to have a happy ending. How Harney treats her is unfortunate, but she also looked at him with closed eyes. Harney fails to get his due, which I suppose is mostly a sign of the times — the man always gets away with it, and the woman is left to clean up the mess. The ending — Charity basically giving up on her dreams — may seem sad to most, but the way I see it, she had other choices and her own blindness and stubbornness led her to that ending. ( )

The heroine of this novel is 18-year-old Charity Royall, who lives with her guardian having been taken from her mother on the Mountain, which represents the uncivilised world - "There's a queer colony up there, you know: sort of outlaws, a little independent kingdom".

In the first part of the novel Charity is sparky and independent. When her guardian stumbles into her bedroom one night, pleading 'lonesomeness', Charity roughly reminds him, "This ain't your wife's room any longer". She demands that he gets Miss Hatchard to make her the new librarian, and insists that her guardian gets "a woman here in the house with me". Royall caves in pretty promptly, although he makes no secret of the fact that what he really wants is for Charity to marry him. Charity, though, wants "some money of my own" so that she can escape from Royall and from the small town of North Dormer.

If the moment when her guardian enters her bedroom is one of the novel's pivotal moments, so too is the arrival in the town of architect Lucius Harney, who seduces Charity but has no intention of marrying her. After her guardian verbally abuses her in public, seeing her out with Harney, Charity thinks of going back to the Mountain. For all her spark and assertiveness, the bottom line is that Charity's options are limited. "She had never learned any trade that would have given her independence in a strange place..."

Once she's discovered she's pregnant, again her first thought is of escape to the Mountain. When she arrives there, however, her horror of the place, the people "herded together in a sort of passive promiscuity in which their common misery was the strongest link", quickly drives her away. She is desperate to escape but realises that, for her, there is no escape. Beyond her small hometown, "everything...was darkness". If there are other options open to her, she can't see them, and so they might as well not exist.

Although the way the story ends seems to close off any chance of Charity finding independence, I don't think it's necessarily as bleak and un-feminist as some critics have claimed. It's true that she ends up married to a man she doesn't love, and that her 'salvation' is gained through the agency of a man rather than through her own efforts; nevertheless, he marries her because she's pregnant, as an act of kindness, and on their honeymoon he chooses to sleep in a chair rather than beside her in bed, 'to show her she was safe with him'. I think the modern reader has to remember that this book was published in 1917. Charity is a strong heroine, I believe, and I don't feel that her ultimate fate is indicative of any weakness on her part, more a practical acceptance of what she must do for her own sake and for that of the child she is carrying. [June 2005]