Summer's Lease is a novel by Sir John Mortimer, author of the Rumpole novels, which is set predominantly in Italy. It was first published in 1988 and made into a British television mini-series starring Sir John Gielgud, first shown in 1989. The title "Summer's Lease" is a play on a line from William Shakespeare's Sonnet 18: And summer's lease hath all too short a date. The novel involves the leasing of a Tuscan villa for the summer holidays. It is divided into six parts: "Preparations", "Arrival", "First Week", "Second Week", "Third Week", and "The Return".
Adaptations (1)
Summer's Lease was adapted into a 1989 miniseries.
Summer's Lease1989 · miniseries · 220 min · IMDb ↗IMDb7.580%Fortysomething wife and mother Molly Pargeter leads a stable but dull life in 1980s West London. She feels overweight and there is no passion in her relationship with her husband Hugh, who is secretly seeing another woman. For most of her life, Molly has found escape in detective novels and art books, especially on 15th-century Italian fresco painter Piero Della Francesca. Suddenly, in the small ads, she spots the details of a Tuscany villa to let, and after a viewing, she takes it for holiday.
