Farewell, Summer

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Ohio State University Press, 2001 - Fiction - 114 pages
It's a long, languorous, country summer in a small Ohio town. After many years spend away as a scholar and a writer, Elizabeth Lane has returned to the setting of her most poignant childhood memories, a town steeped in her family's long history. She comes to Sunbury to work on a book but finds she is haunted by one memory in particular. It was 1905, she was eleven and in love with her cousin, Steve, painfully watching his ill-fated romance with the beautiful Damaris. Looking back, Elizabeth discovers a world of feeling what she knows belong more to adulthood than childhood, and as she sees the tragic, doomed love of Steve and Damaris, she wishes she could be a child forever. Peopled with superbly realized characters, steeped in the golden glow of an era fondly recalled, and marked by the prodigious talent displayed in ". . .And Ladies of the Club," Farewell, Summer is the moving tale of star-crossed love-innocent and elusive-and a young girl coming of age.

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About the author (2001)

Helen Hooven Santmyer was born on November 25, 1895 in Xenia, Ohio. She attended both Wellesley College and Oxford University and was active in the struggle for women's rights. During her life, she has worked as a writer, an English professor, a librarian, and a dean of women. She is the author of And Ladies of the Club (1984), which was published when she was 88 years old. Her other works include Early Promise, Late Reward; Herbs and Apples; Ohio Town; and The Fierce Dispute. Early Promise, Late Reward tells the story of a small town Midwestern girl who was educated at Wellesley and became one of the first female Rhodes Scholars. She died on February 21, 1986 and was inducted into the Ohio Women's Hall of Fame in 1996.

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