“It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs,” reads the first line of Sylvia Plath’s singular novel The Bell Jar (1963). “And I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.” It’s a different kind of summer to that of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925). Within the first few pages, Clarissa Dalloway strolls through post-First World War London, and muses upon “people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June.” Clarissa knew exactly what she was doing in London.
A married socialite in London; a young writer in New York. In the case of Joan Didion’s Play It as It Lays (1970), the year-round summer of Los Angeles is relentless and oppressive, and the female protagonist is a divorced actress. In 2020, in her debut novel Happy Hour, party girl turned writer Marlowe Granados wrote a heroine – a savvy young socialite named Isa navigating a Manhattan summer – who might find more in common with Plath’s Esther.
These are not the romantic, comedic summer beach reads and airport WHSmith stock. Instead, they are novels that use summer as a vehicle of plot: to wield psychological force upon the characters, to offer an illusion of freedom that cannot be sustained, and to heighten their inner tensions with their socially conditional lives. The writers chronicle heat, suspended time and societal pressures that push their female protagonists into anxiety and emotional overload.
Summer promises liberation more than any other season, creating the desire for a suspension of routine. “Summer solstice came and went,” writes Granados. “I find that sad because even though it is the longest day of the year and marks the beginning of summer, from now on, the days grow shorter and shorter. It’s true that some parties end before they even begin.”
These writers use the nature of the season – humid, unstructured, what the poet Carol Ann Duffy calls “untidy, hot, fractious under the heavy, sexy sky” – and weaponise it to expose just how limited their heroines’ freedoms really are. In The Bell Jar, during the narrator Esther Greenwood’s summer internship at a magazine, she details “drinking martinis in a skimpy, imitation silver-lamé bodice stuck on to a big, fat cloud of white tulle, on some Starlight Roof, in the company of several anonymous young men with all-American bone structures”. She then adds wryly, “I was supposed to be having the time of my life.”
The unravelling of Didion’s Maria Wyeth is introduced immediately: the novel opens with Maria in a psychiatric hospital. The story chronicles her mental state of nothingness, set against the hedonism of glitzy 1960s LA. Throughout the book, Didion is urgent in capturing the claustrophobia lurking in the stillness of Maria’s career-less, kept life; there is seemingly nothing to do but go to parties pulsing with performance, to attend mind-numbingly dull dinners and drinks. Maria is indifferent throughout: “‘I don’t like any of you,’ she said. ‘You are all making me sick.’”
Motifs of summer are both prison and freedom to Maria. On the one hand, summer acts as a status in its own right for her circle – Didion details the “out-of-season tans”, the diamond bracelets upon “thin, tanned wrists”, the obnoxious demand for fresh limes, not lime juice. On the other, elements of summer present Maria with the only acts of rebellion she can commit in this world: directionless driving on the highway, in which the desert landscape gives her momentary freedom; sleeping outside in the heat, despite the luxury inside. And, crucially, it is summer when Maria has the affair with a friend that leads her to be blackmailed into an illegal abortion by her husband.
It is a similar story with Plath’s Esther Greenwood. Summer for her is, at first, the fodder of teenage dreams: not only is she in New York City for the season, but her life suddenly opens up to parties, bars, daring girlfriends and dangerous men. Detailing why she “never wanted to get married”, Esther expresses her desire for freedom: she “wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions… like the coloured arrows from a Fourth of July rocket”. In fact, while suffering with acute food poisoning, Esther notes that “it didn’t seem to be summer anymore”.
It is the sizzling Manhattan heat with the fireworks, the Rosenbergs’ electrocution – and, climactically, Esther’s electric shock treatment – that beats throughout the novel. After sharing a bed with a sophisticated man, Esther details “a little electric shock”. The internship girls wear “starched cotton summer nighties”, but the glamorous Doreen, whose friendship with Esther leads her into the city’s dark side, wears “dressing gowns the colour of sin, that stuck to her by some kind of electricity”. The static heat of summer, for both women, runs from seduction to sentence. Summer, in these novels, is not a life but a loan granted in June and repossessed come autumn.
Summer’s restless anxiety continues into the 21st century, from this year’s Female, Nude (2026) by Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett, Coco Mellors’s commercial hit Cleopatra and Frankenstein (2022), Zadie Smith’s literary NW (2012), to Happy Hour. Granados’s protagonist, Isa, and Isa’s friend, Gala, move to New York City, the season enticing them not just to try something new, but to be someone different. “As much as summer is about branching into a semblance of adulthood,” she writes, “it is also about fun.” Gala is in on it too. “I don’t know how you can be sad in this heat!” she says. Well, Esther probably felt the same way at first. The season is not just fun, but a convenient condition for a desired way of life. Unlike Esther and Maria, so constrained by the societal demands on women, Happy Hour starts as a celebration of not just the freedom of summer, but the freedom of being a young woman in this decade. The girls revel in the bohemia of being beautiful and having no money, relying on men for both drinks and kicks, and mingling freely with the successful and wealthy.
And yet the day after the solstice, Isa declares that her worries about paying the rent have made her anxious: “The kind that, when neglected, transforms into something worse… no one helps you when you have an air of desperation.” Suddenly, the heat of June is compared to a “sedate fever”. Isa starts resenting those around her; their unchecked privileges, their pious hypocrisies. As the novel progresses, she is trapped in a prison of near-poverty. Technically homeless, she eats “rationed halves of three-dollar grilled cheese sandwiches”, and falls out with Gala over finances. Yet summer does, eventually, end. Granados uses the approach of autumn not as a reckoning, but as a release. When Isa walks “with an alertness that feels new”, she concludes that “it had significantly cooled. And for the first time in months, I wished I had a jacket.”
Mrs Dalloway, on the other hand, has no autumn – it takes place on a singular June day. Still, time is an inescapable component of the novel, used to navigate Clarissa’s rich inner life and the restraints of her outer. Summer is nostalgic; she is aware of its sensation, how she once experienced its substance: “June had drawn out every leaf on the trees. The mothers of Pimlico gave suck to their young… and Piccadilly seemed to chafe the very air in the Park and lift its leaves hotly, brilliantly, on waves of that divine vitality which Clarissa loved. To dance, to ride, she had adored all that.” Summer allows Clarissa to remember a freer time in her life, recalling a season in her youth spent in Bourton, “walking in quite unexpectedly without a penny in her pocket” and a romance with a former beau, Peter. The language once again evokes the heat to mirror the passion of the interior. “Long as summer days, and flaming, she remembered, with nothing but red asters, he had gone.”
Clarissa is the eldest of these novels’ protagonists, and unlike Maria, Esther and Isa, she is remembering the freedoms she once had. Summer is not a cage for her expectations, but a taunting reminder of youthful experiences. “She was not old yet. She had just broken into her fifty-second year… June, July, August!” The suspension of time grants expansion of long-gone memories. The lasting impact of summer, deeply experienced by these characters, is not true liberation. Instead, it is a brief, vivid sensation of it, a seasonal reminder of the lives they cannot lead.
[Further reading: Claudia Rankine’s new visions]
Content from our partners
Related
This article appears in the 20 Aug 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Summer Special
Join the debate
Subscribe here to comment