Fiction · 1899
The Awakening
And Selected Short Stories
Edna Pontellier, summering with her husband and children on Grand Isle, learns to swim, and discovers that she has begun to want a life of her own. What follows — the return to New Orleans, the house she takes for herself, the painting, Robert Lebrun, the sea — Kate Chopin sets down without once telling the reader what to think.
The Awakening was published in 1899 and treated harshly; Chopin published little afterwards and died five years later. It was rediscovered in the 1960s and is now among the most read American novels of its century.
This volume prints the novel complete and, after it, a selection of Chopin’s short stories — Beyond the Bayou, Désirée’s Baby, A Respectable Woman, The Kiss, A Pair of Silk Stockings and A Reflection among them.
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About this edition
The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.
Part of Women Writers.
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About the author
1850–1904 · Victorian
Kate Chopin (1850–1904) was born Katherine O’Flaherty in St. Louis and lived after her marriage in New Orleans and in rural Louisiana, the settings of most of her fiction. Widowed at thirty-two with six children, she returned to St. Louis and began to write: the story collections Bayou Folk (1894) and A Night in Acadie (1897), and the novel The Awakening (1899), whose hostile reception effectively ended her career. She was rediscovered in the 1960s.
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