The Awakening

Summering with Creole society on Grand Isle, off the Louisiana coast, Edna Pontellier is a good wife and a fond mother — and yet that summer something in her begins to stir. The attentions of the charming Robert Lebrun, the warmth of the Creole world she has never quite belonged to, and above all the sea, in which she teaches herself to swim, wake her to the fact of her own separate, sovereign self.

Back in New Orleans the awakening only deepens. Edna abandons the rituals of her married life, takes up her painting in earnest, moves into a small house of her own, and pursues desire where she finds it — suspended between two fates embodied by the women around her: Adèle Ratignolle, the radiant mother-woman wholly given to her family, and Mademoiselle Reisz, the uncompromising pianist who has kept her art and her freedom at the cost of everything else. What is a woman to do, The Awakening asks, who can be neither?

Published in 1899, the novel was condemned for its frank treatment of female desire and independence, and it effectively ended Kate Chopin's career; rediscovered in 1969, it became one of the founding works of feminist literature and a fixture of the American canon. Lyrical, intimate, and unflinching — and famous for an ending readers still argue over — it remains one of the most quietly radical novels in American fiction.

This edition pairs the complete text with an editor's foreword on the novel's composition, scandal, and rediscovery, a biographical note, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.