"If you know Starkfield, Massachusetts. you must know the post-office. If you know the post-office you must have seen Ethan Frome drive up to it, drop the reins on his hollow-backed bay and drag himself across the brick pavement to the white colonnade: and you must have asked who he was.

An unnamed narrator, an engineer marooned for most of a winter in Starkfield by a strike, gradually learns the truth about Ethan, his wife, Zenobia (Zeen•a), and Mattie Silver, Zenobia's cousin, finding their harsh lives to be compounded of duty and social expectation, and saturated with lovelessness and vengeance.

Wharton noted that "Summer deals with the same class and type as those portrayed in Ethan home, and has the same setting." And though the plight of librarian Charity Royall is less tragic than Ethan Frome's, her sense of isolation and the anguish caused by her feelings for Lucius Harney are no less intense.

In this pair of novellas, Wharton, famed for her light and vibrant touch, explores the darker reaches of love and obligation.
--front flap