Indian Summer by William Dean Howells

First published: 1886

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Domestic realism

Time of plot: Shortly after the American Civil War

Locale: Florence, Italy

Principal characters

• Theodore Colville, a middle-aged bachelor
• Mrs. Lina Bowen, a middle-aged friend of Colville
• Imogene Graham, a girl chaperoned by Mrs. Bowen
• Effie Bowen, Mrs. Bowen’s thirteen-year-old daughter
• Mr. Morton, an admirer of Imogene Graham

The Story:

Theodore Colville studies architecture as a young man and continues his professional education by spending some months in Italy. While there, he goes about with two young women. He falls in love with one of them, but the woman rejects his suit. Soon afterward, he goes back to the United States at the request of his older brother, who had recently purchased a newspaper. Colville becomes the editor of his brother’s paper and eventually purchases it. He enters politics in his fortieth year. After being defeated, he leaves his home in Indiana and returns to Italy.

Colville tries to resume the study of architecture but is diverted after meeting Mrs. Bowen, who was the companion he did not fall in love with in Italy years before. Mrs. Bowen, now a widow, invites Colville to visit at her home. Colville meets Mrs. Bowen’s thirteen-year-old daughter, Effie, who quickly becomes fond of him, as well as Imogene Graham, a twenty-year-old American woman Mrs. Bowen is chaperoning.

Colville spends many pleasant days and evenings with Mrs. Bowen, Imogene, and Effie. At first, Imogene regards him as an old man, since he is twice her age, but she soon realizes that she enjoys his company much more than that of many men her own age. In an effort to be companionable with her, Colville dances and goes about socially as he did not do for many years. Mrs. Bowen also enjoys Colville’s company.

Mrs. Bowen chooses carefully the places where she and her charges go. During the carnival season, she permits Colville to take them all to a masked ball. At the ball, little Effie becomes ill and has to be taken home unexpectedly. As a result, Imogene and Colville spend much of the evening together unchaperoned. They begin to realize their affection for each other.

Mrs. Bowen is quick to realize that a love affair is developing between them. She tactfully points out to Imogene the differences between her and the much older man. When she says, rather less tactfully, that she thinks Colville is only trying to be amusing, the girl reports the conversation to Colville. Hurt, he goes to Mrs. Bowen and talks with her, finally agreeing to her suggestion that for propriety’s sake he leave Florence. Because it is a weekend and Colville has insufficient funds to settle his hotel bill, he is forced to wait until the following Monday. By that time, Imogene decides that it is unfair to make him leave the city because of her. When she asks him to stay, he agrees to do so.

A few days later, Colville and Imogene meet accidentally in a public park. They decide that they love each other, and they go back to Mrs. Bowen’s residence to tell her that they have decided to be married. Mrs. Bowen, as Imogene’s chaperone, tells them she will be forced to write immediately to the girl’s parents to inform them of this recent development. The lovers agree to her plan and promise to say nothing about an official engagement until they hear from Imogene’s parents. Imogene warns her chaperone, however, that she will marry Colville even without her parents’ consent.

While they await word from America, a young minister named Morton, who is also in love with Imogene, returns to Florence. Both Colville and Mrs. Bowen wish to tell the young man the state of affairs, but the girl refuses to permit it. Finally, word comes from Imogene’s parents. Her mother will sail for Europe to see Colville for herself before giving her decision.

During the intervening days before Mrs. Graham’s arrival, the four—Mrs. Bowen, Mr. Morton, Imogene, and Colville—go on an excursion to see the Etruscan ruins in Fiesole. At one point, Colville and the young minister walk a short distance beside the carriage. A peasant driving a band of sheep comes over the brow of a hill, frightening the horses, who begin to back the carriage dangerously close to a precipitous drop at the side of the road. The two men rescue the women from the carriage. While Mr. Morton takes Imogene from the vehicle, Colville runs to the horses’ heads to try to hold them. When his hand catches in the curb strap, he is dragged with the team when the carriage plunges over the edge of the road.

For two weeks, Colville lies very ill. When he is finally able to have visitors, Imogene’s mother comes to see him and tells him she is taking her daughter back to America immediately. She feels that Colville acts like a gentleman, but she tells him that her daughter is not really in love with him, although she thinks too much of him to break the engagement. Colville is stricken but perceives that Imogene’s departure is the only answer to the situation. After her mother leaves, Imogene comes into the sickroom and bids Colville a hasty good-bye.

Some time later, Mrs. Bowen and Colville talk over the affair. During the conversation, they admit that they love each other, but Mrs. Bowen refuses to marry Colville because of the embarrassing position in which she was placed during his affair with Imogene. She hated herself the whole time she tried to prevent the affair because, although she hoped she could see the situation objectively, she always feared that her actions and thinking had been colored by her feeling for Colville.

Little Effie, having formed a very strong attachment for Colville, refuses to hear of his departure. Within a few months, under the influence of their mutual love and Effie’s attitude toward her mother’s suitor, Mrs. Bowen reconciles to a marriage. They are married quietly and then move to Rome, where no one who knows them can spread gossip about the affair with Imogene. Not long after their marriage, they hear that Mr. Morton, who was deeply in love with Imogene, was appointed to a church in a community near Buffalo, where the Grahams live. Both Mr. and Mrs. Colville hope that he and Imogene Graham will make a match of their own.

Bibliography

Eble, Kenneth. William Dean Howells. 2d ed. Boston: Twayne, 1982. A chronological assessment of Howells’s fiction. In the chapter focusing on Indian Summer and the 1888 novel April Hopes, Eble ranks the former among Howells’s most successful dramatizations of the folly of a romantic and sentimental outlook.

Goodman, Susan, and Carl Dawson. William Dean Howells: A Writer’s Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Broad and compelling biography providing a comprehensive account of Howells’s life and work. Among other topics, the biographers discuss Howells’s friendships with and support of contemporary writers and his significance in American letters. Includes illustrations and bibliography.

Howe, Patricia. “William Dean Howells’s Indian Summer and Theodor Fontane’s Effi Briest: Forms and Phases of the Realistic Novel.” Modern Language Review 102, no. 1 (January, 2007): 125-138. Compares the two novels and their authors’ different conceptions of realism.

Howells, William Dean. Indian Summer. Vol. 11 in A Selected Edition of William Dean Howells. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971. This edition of the novel contains an introduction and notes by Scott Bennett, who counters the often expressed view of Indian Summer as an exercise in nostalgia and argues that the novel reflects Howells’s full artistic maturity.

Stratman, Gregory J. Speaking for Howells: Charting the Dean’s Career Through the Language of His Characters. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2001. Analyzes Howells’s interest in language, focusing on the language of his characters and his use of literary dialect. Stratman argues that Howells’s use of and writing about language demonstrate how his career moved in a circular path, from Romanticism to realism and back to Romanticism.

Wagenknecht, Edward. William Dean Howells: The Friendly Eye. New York: Oxford University Press, 1969. No sustained discussion of Indian Summer but shrewd observations on the novel in many references. Wagenknecht notes, for example, that the novel contradicts Howells’s critical disapproval of violence in fiction by resolving the hero’s love affair through the medium of a carriage accident.

Woodress, James J., Jr. Howells and Italy. New York: Greenwood Press, 1952. Assesses Indian Summer as a neatly plotted minor masterpiece, though unrepresentative of Howells’s work generally. Woodress emphasizes the correlation between Howells’s and his own Italian experiences, as well as his skill at evoking the Italian setting in Indian Summer.

Wright, Nathalia. American Novelists in Italy: The Discoverers—Allston to James. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1965. Discusses a succession of nineteenth century novelists and gives considerable attention to Howells’s Italian novels. Views Indian Summer as reflecting his tendency to emphasize that Europe exerted a more pernicious influence on American men than on American women.