Esther cancels summer school and decides to write a novel

Esther Greenwood’s cancellation of summer school and decision to write a novel turn a formal rejection into an immediate act of self-direction. The summer writing course will not admit her; rather than take the alternative course offered to her, she withdraws from summer school altogether and chooses to spend the summer writing a novel. Her resolve is practical, defiant, and pointedly connected to the people she believes the book will affect.

The Rejection and the Choice

A letter from the summer school lies on the dining-room table beside a note addressed to Esther in Buddy Willard’s handwriting. Esther opens the school’s letter with a knife. It informs her that she has not been accepted for the writing course, but she may choose another course if she contacts the Admissions Office that morning. Registration is nearly full, so the alternative requires an immediate decision.

The letter offers a way to remain in the summer-school program, but Esther does not take it. She telephones the Admissions Office and listens to a recorded message in which her voice identifies Miss Esther Greenwood and cancels all arrangements for her to attend summer school. The call makes her refusal concrete: she does not merely lose the writing course or postpone a decision; she withdraws from the entire summer-school plan.

A Decision Made by Telephone

The speed and form of the cancellation matter. The school has set a deadline, and Esther answers it with a phone call that completes the withdrawal while she listens to the message being left. The choice is thus not only an intention to leave but an action carried out within the same morning, before the alternative courses fill. What the school presents as a narrowing set of options becomes the occasion for Esther to reject the whole arrangement.

The episode follows her handling of the two letters on the table. After cancelling summer school, she opens Buddy’s letter, reads of his possible love for a nurse with tuberculosis and his mother’s invitation to spend July at a cottage in the Adirondacks, then writes back that she is engaged to a simultaneous interpreter and never wants to see Buddy again. The school call and the reply to Buddy are distinct acts, but together they show Esther refusing plans that would keep her future organized around other people’s proposals.

The Novel as a New Objective

After the call and the letter, Esther decides to spend the summer writing a novel. The decision supplies a replacement for the course she had wanted: she will continue writing, but outside the institution that has rejected her and without enrolling in another class. The novel is not described as a completed work or as a guaranteed success; the evidence records her decision and the expectation she attaches to it.

That expectation is openly combative. Esther thinks the novel will “fix a lot of people.” The phrase makes writing sound less like a neutral exercise or a conventional summer project than an answer directed at people who have wronged or constrained her. The text does not name each intended target, so the declaration should not be narrowed to a particular person. Its force lies in the link Esther makes between authoring a book and setting something right for herself, or at least delivering a reckoning to others.

Significance of the Reversal

The sequence moves from institutional judgment to self-assigned work: the course is unavailable, the offered alternative is refused, and the novel becomes Esther’s chosen undertaking. The rejection therefore changes the shape of her summer without extinguishing her desire to write. Her decision does not establish that the project will succeed, but it does mark a change in who sets the terms of her next step.

The novel’s imagined effect also complicates that independence. Esther claims a new objective for herself, yet describes its value through what it will do to “a lot of people.” The decision combines a wish to work on her own terms with a wish to answer an audience beyond herself. In this brief turning point, cancellation is both an exit from an imposed program and the beginning of a literary ambition sharpened by grievance.