A Summer Novella by Stefan Zweig. Short summary

5 seconds

An elderly aristocrat told the author that for fun, he wrote love letters to a young girl. The writer guessed that the narrator was truly in love with her.

1 minute

An elderly aristocrat tells the author a story that happened to him last year.

One day he noticed two vacationing, un-aged sisters with a young girl. It was the daughter of one of them.

She interested the aristocrat by her defenselessness and, for fun, he began to write her love letters anonymously.

The girl was transformed and blossomed. One day she saw a handsome Italian young man and decided that he wrote to her.

The aristocrat wrote another letter, but caused the girl only anguish, for the next day she left.

After listening to the aristocrat’s story, the writer remarked that the story would have made a good novel.

Only he would have deepened the image of the unmarried aristocrat who wrote the letters. In the novella, the elderly hero would, without noticing it himself, fall in love with the girl.

It turned out that this is exactly what happened to the non-young narrator.