Summer by Edith Wharton

Wharton called this her 'hot Ethan,' and the comparison is apt — Summer is a compact, psychologically devastating portrait of a young woman with almost no good choices, told with the precision of a writer at full command of her craft. The ending is morally ambiguous in ways that still generate genuine debate, and the guardian-ward marriage dynamic is troubling by any modern standard. But as literary art it belongs in the conversation alongside Wharton's best work, and serious readers of American fiction should know it.