Second Summer of Love

The Second Summer of Love, much advertised but experienced by Emma Morley as a period of melancholy and lost momentum, marks a failed promise of renewal. The novel gives the cultural label its force through the gap between the excitement it suggests and the stalled, increasingly constricted life Emma is living.

The Promise and Its Reversal

The phrase names a public expectation, but Emma’s account supplies no corresponding story of collective exhilaration. Instead, the season is remembered for its lack of momentum. The contrast is decisive: what was promoted as a summer of possibility becomes the backdrop to a year in which Emma’s plans repeatedly fail to take hold.

Emma’s Edinburgh Stalemate

By then, even Edinburgh, which Emma had loved, has begun to bore and depress her. Remaining in her University town feels like staying at a party after everyone else has left. In October she gives up her flat on Rankeillor Street and moves back in with her parents, where a long, wet winter brings recriminations, slammed doors and afternoon television. Her mother repeatedly invokes Emma’s double-first degree as though it ought to guarantee a successful direction in life; Emma’s younger sister, now a married nurse with a new baby, visits at night and gloats over the family’s once-favoured daughter in decline. The return home makes the loss of momentum material: Emma has not merely failed to advance, but has retreated from the independent life she had built in Edinburgh.

The Summer’s Personal Disappointments

The larger mood is reinforced by a string of abandoned attempts. Emma’s all-girl band cycles through the names Throat, Slaughterhouse Six and Bad Biscuit without settling on either a name or a musical direction. An alternative club night attracts no one; two novels are abandoned; summer work selling cashmere and tartan to tourists brings little satisfaction. Even a course in Circus Skills ends when Emma discovers she has none. The sequence gives the Second Summer of Love an intimate measure: its failure is registered not through a public event, but through the accumulation of projects that do not become a life.

Later Contrasts in Travel and Movement

Elsewhere, the novel sets Emma’s later encounters with movement against this earlier feeling of confinement. On a trip to an island, the clear sea and unfamiliar landscape make her feel far from the launderette, the night bus and Tilly Killick’s box room; travel becomes a genuine escape from the daily world. Much later, riding through North London in heavy rain toward Kilburn, Emma is thrown from her bicycle and cannot move her head. These scenes do not describe the Second Summer of Love itself. They sharpen its significance within the wider story: freedom and forward motion are not guaranteed by a season’s promise, and the feeling of being stuck can give way to exhilarating distance—or to sudden physical vulnerability.