Farewell, Summer

Über

Farewell, Summer is a novella by Helen Hooven Santmyer. Written after her first two novels, it was not published until after Santmyer's death. The novella tells the 1935 memories of Elizabeth Lane about the summer of 1905, when she had been eleven and in love with her "Wild West cousin" Steve Van Doren, who was romancing, to no avail, another cousin, Damaris, who is intent on never marrying and is planning on becoming a nun. The 1935 Elizabeth now understands what the 1905 Elizabeth was actually seeing.
At the time of her 1984 fame, Santmyer, aged 88, no longer remembered the novella, but a niece remembered seeing the manuscript, and a search was made for it amongst her papers.
The brief plot summary that Theresa Stevens, the writer character in Santmyer's "...And Ladies of the Club", gives for her second book describes a woman who remembers twenty years back a romancing that she had been too young to understand at the time.