The Summer Wives

The Summer Wives (2018) is a historical fiction novel by Beatriz Williams that blends mystery, romance, and family drama. The story unfolds across three timelines—1930, 1951, and 1969—on the exclusive, fictional Winthrop Island. In 1969, celebrated actress Miranda Thomas returns to the island she left 18 years earlier. Her arrival coincides with the prison escape of Joseph Vargas, the man convicted of murdering her stepfather. Miranda’s return forces her to confront the island’s long-buried secrets from the fateful summer of 1951, when she first fell in love with Joseph. Through its interwoven narratives, the novel explores themes including The Corrosive Nature of Family Secrets, The Hypocrisy of the Patrician Elite, and Class Segregation as Social Shield.

Beatriz Williams, a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author known for acclaimed works like A Hundred Summers, draws inspiration for Winthrop Island from the real-life Fishers Island, New York—a private summer enclave for wealthy families in Long Island Sound. The novel meticulously recreates the island’s stratified society, contrasting the insular world of the old-money families with the Portuguese American working class, a community with deep roots in the region’s maritime industries.

Content Warning: The source text features depictions of physical and emotional abuse, graphic violence, illness, death, sexual content, sexual violence and harassment, pregnancy loss or termination, death by suicide, substance use, animal cruelty and death, and religious discrimination.

Plot Summary

In 1969, 36-year-old actress Miranda Thomas, whose maiden name is Schuyler, returns to the exclusive Winthrop Island after 18 years away. She is fleeing her abusive husband in London and arrives with a black eye, which she claims is from a car accident. The island is abuzz with the news that Joseph Vargas, the man convicted of murdering her stepfather, has escaped from prison. Miranda is collected by Mrs. Medeiro, the general store owner, and driven to Greyfriars, the once-grand estate of her late stepfather, Hugh Fisher. The house is now a crumbling artist colony run by her mother, Francine, and stepsister, Isobel. 

Miranda’s return reopens the wounds of the summer of 1951, the year she first came to the island. In 1951, 18-year-old Miranda arrives for Francine’s wedding to the wealthy Hugh Fisher. She is thrust into a stratified world of elite, white families who visit in the summer and the local Portuguese working class. On the morning of the wedding, she witnesses a young lobsterman, Joseph Vargas, dive into the sea to rescue an older fisherman, Mr. Silva. When Joseph brings the injured man to the Greyfriars dock, Miranda helps, and she is immediately enamored with him.

As the summer of 1951 unfolds, Miranda’s feelings for Joseph deepen. She learns he is the son of Pascoal Vargas, the keeper of the Fleet Rock lighthouse visible from her window. Miranda discovers her new stepsister, Isobel, shares a secret relationship with Joseph that Miranda interprets as romantic, despite Isobel being engaged to the respectable Clayton “Clay” Monk. Isobel enlists Miranda as a reluctant courier for her clandestine notes to Joseph, forcing brief, charged encounters between Miranda and the young lobsterman. Clay, meanwhile, confides in Miranda his anxieties about Isobel’s attachment to the fisherman’s son. 

The complex web of relationships is rooted in a much older island secret, revealed in a narrative from 1930. Seventeen-year-old Bianca Medeiro, an orphan, lives with her aunt and uncle’s family, who runs the general store. She is infatuated with the same Hugh Fisher, even though he is rumored to have been involved with her cousin Francesca the year prior. When Hugh visits the store, he is immediately attracted to her and maintains a secret flirtation, which he keeps chaste due to his impending marriage to the Countess Abigail Dumont. Bianca believes she and Hugh are fated to be together.

In 1969, Miranda struggles to enmesh herself in society on the island. She gets to know her much younger half-brother, Hugh Jr., the son of Hugh and Francine. She worries for the island culture’s impact on him and buys a boat from a local family, the Huxleys, with the intent to refurbish it and offer it as a means for him to sail the world. However, Isobel resents Miranda’s presence and her involvement with their brother, blaming her for the mysterious events of 1951. Hugh Jr. likes her, though. A man named Tom Donnelly invites Miranda to use her acting knowledge to stage a group performance at an end-of-summer party, and she begins training locals to perform an act of The Tempest, her favorite play that she once bonded over with Joseph. However, U.S. Marshals have arrived on the island looking for Joseph, surprised at how the islanders resent their presence.

In 1930, after Hugh’s abusive father’s death, he finds solace with Bianca, and they begin a passionate affair. Believing his promises of love, Bianca is devastated when he proceeds with his society marriage to Abigail. Fearing she is pregnant, Bianca desperately seduces her cousin’s fiancé, the older, kind-hearted Pascoal Vargas, who dutifully marries her. She gives birth to Hugh Fisher’s son, Joseph, in the Fleet Rock lighthouse, forever estranged from her family.

The summer of 1951 is tumultuous. Isobel ends her engagement to Clay at a clubhouse party, after which Miranda is sent to check on the distraught Clay out on the golf course. There, he drunkenly kisses and fondles her, and they are discovered by a friend, Livy Huxley—whom he is eventually married to by the events of 1969. In 1951, though, Isobel is encouraged to mend her relationship with Clay. Isobel yearns to leave the island. At the end of the summer, after a day spent lobstering together, Miranda and Joseph go for a swim and finally confess their mutual love, sharing their first kiss. Joseph explains that he is Hugh Fisher’s son and Isobel’s half-brother—hence their correspondence—to dismiss Miranda’s hesitation over their relationship. Their romance, however, is immediately complicated by the early return of Francine and Hugh from their European honeymoon. At dinner, Francine joyfully announces that she is pregnant. 

In 1969, Miranda’s husband Carroll finally tracks her to the island. He is a famous filmmaker who professionally groomed her from a young age and married her in her mid-twenties. He was consistently unfaithful and controlling, and he—after she became pregnant earlier that year—accused her of cheating on him. Furious, he drunkenly crashed the car they were in, causing her to lose the baby. On the island, he apologizes, but she rebukes him. When he nearly hits her, Hugh Jr. intervenes. After, as she and her brother bond, Mrs. Medeiro delivers a secret note from Joseph asking to meet Miranda that night, after the clubhouse party and her Shakespeare performance. Entering the party, she has a confrontation with the Marshals, who accuse her of harboring Joseph. The stage play is a success, and she sneaks away.

In 1951, after her parents’ return from their honeymoon, Miranda and Joseph secretly meet on the beach at Fleet Rock. In the lighthouse, Joseph’s mother Bianca overhears Miranda say that her mother is pregnant with Hugh’s baby and becomes overwhelmed. Miranda falls asleep and wakes to hear Hugh is dead. Joseph appears to have killed him and is taken away. 

A distraught Hugh Fisher rows to the lighthouse to confront his former lover, Bianca Vargas. In the ensuing struggle, Hugh is stabbed with a kitchen knife and killed. When Joseph discovers the scene, he confesses to the murder to protect his mother. Miranda is ostracized for publicly defending Joseph’s character, believing it must have been an accident. Her mother disowns her, and she is banished from the island, taken to Europe by Isobel’s mother, the Countess, where she eventually builds a new life as an actress.

After the 1969 clubhouse party, Miranda meets with Joseph, who reveals he escaped prison only because he learned his mother, Bianca, is dying of cancer and has no one to care for her. They rekindle their love, but their bonding is interrupted by Bianca’s worsening condition. Despite the danger, Joseph seeks out a priest on the island at Bianca’s request, during which Bianca confesses to Miranda that she killed Hugh Fisher. She stabbed him in a jealous rage upon learning of Francine’s pregnancy. Isobel arrives with the priest but says Miranda’s husband, Carroll, saw Joseph and turned him over to the marshals. She turns off the lighthouse to deter the arrival of the Coast Guard who will take him away. She also reveals to Miranda that she was the one who, in a fit of possessiveness over her brother, told their father that Miranda and Joseph were at the lighthouse together, precipitating the fatal confrontation. Hugh rowing over to interrupt their meeting allowed Bianca to find him and kill him. Joseph wouldn’t let his mother go to prison and decided to take the blame for her.

Miranda and Isobel flee to the island after noticing a fire at the clubhouse, started by Tom Donnelly as a diversion. In the chaos, Miranda runs after the marshals and Joseph, risking being shot. As they attempt to arrest him, Clay Monk creates a diversion by firing his service pistol. A marshal is knocked into the dangerous waves, and instead of escaping first, Joseph helps him back into the boat. He then swims away. Clay drives Miranda back to Greyfriars, where the marshals conduct a fruitless search of the house. Isobel and Miranda smuggle Joseph out of a hidden compartment in the boathouse. He escapes the island for good on the sailboat Miranda had purchased for Hugh Jr. A year later, in 1970, Miranda is living at Greyfriars, pregnant with Joseph’s child. Through Clay Monk’s legal efforts and her own public influence, she has secured a full presidential pardon for Joseph, who was presumed dead after falling into the water but honored for saving a marshal. As she waits on the dock reciting Shakespeare to her unborn child, she sees a lone sailboat making its way up the channel toward her.