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"This seems to me a higher order of feminism than repeating the story of woman as victim... Kate Chopin gives her female protagonist the central role, normally reserved for Man, in a meditation on identity and culture, consciousness and art." -- From the introduction by Marilynne Robinson.

First published in 1899, this beautiful, brief novel so disturbed critics and the public that it was banished for decades afterward. Now widely read and admired, The Awakening has been hailed as an early vision of woman's emancipation. This sensuous book tells of a woman's abandonment of her family, her seduction, and her awakening to desires and passions that threated to consumer her. Originally entitled "A Solitary Soul," this portrait of twenty-eight-year-old Edna Pontellier is a landmark in American fiction, rooted firmly in the romantic tradition of Herman Melville and Emily Dickinson. Here, a woman in search of self-discovery turns away from convention and society, and toward the primal, from convention and society, and toward the primal, irresistibly attracted to nature and the sensesThe Awakening, Kate Chopin's last novel, has been praised by Edmund Wilson as "beautifully written." And Willa Cather described its style as "exquisite," "sensitive," and "iridescent." This edition of The Awakening also includes a selection of short stories by Kate Chopin.

Kate Chopin, was born Katherine O'Flaherty in St. Louis on Feburary8,1851, of a prosperous Irish-born merchant father and an aristocratic Creole mother. She studied piano, wrote poetry, and read Dickens, Austen, Goethe, de Stael, and the Brontes. Despite her free spirit--she was once nicknamed the "littlest rebel" for yanking down a Union flag--Kate grew to be a leading social belle, admired for her wit and beauty.

In 1870 she married Oscar Chopin. Matrimony did not quell her independence; she dressed unconventionally, took long unchaperoned walks, and smoked cigarettes. In their twelve years of married life, she bore six children, and upon Oscar's sudden death in 1882 she took over the management of the Chopin family plantation in Natchitoches, Louisana. She turned seriously to writing shortly thereafter, publishing stories in Vogue and Atlantic Monthly. She wrote a novel, At Fault(1890), Bayou Folk, a collection of stories(1894), A Night in Acadie, a second collection (1897), and her masterpiece The Awakening(1899), which aroused a national scandal for its "indecency." Banned by libraries, it even prevented her admission into the St. Louis Fine Arts Club--even though Kate Chopin was famous for her literary salon, which attracted distinguished artists and writers from all over the country.

Always sensitive to criticism, Chopin was devastated by the furor that surrounded the publication of The Awakening, and its harsh reception ultimately caused her to stop writing. When she died in 1904, she had been denied the recognition she desperately wanted and richly deserved.