Byars chose her home of twenty years, West Virginia, as the setting for The Summer of the Swans. Her abiding appreciation of the locale's natural beauty permeates her descriptions, making them authentic. She says that she set the novel in West Virginia "to give the reader the feeling of the power of the land over the individual." The idea for the swans in the story came from a newspaper article in her college alumni magazine that told about the swans at Furman University that left their own beautiful lake each year and flew to less desirable ponds. The setting in time is not particularly important to the story, but the action probably takes place around the time the novel was published, 1970.