The Awakening

Kate Chopin

• Publisher: Laurus Book Society
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780599890718
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

The Awakening is a novel by Kate Chopin, first published in 1899. Set in New Orleans and on the Louisiana Gulf coast at the end of the 19th century.

Born to a prominent St. Louis family, Katherine O’Flaherty read widely as a girl. In June 1870 she married Oscar Chopin, with whom she lived in his native New Orleans, Louisiana, and later on a plantation near Cloutiersville, Louisiana, until his death in 1882. After he died she began to write about the Creole and Cajun people she had observed in the South. Her first novel, At Fault (1890), was undistinguished, but she was later acclaimed for her finely crafted short stories, of which she wrote more than 100. Two of these stories, “Désirée’s Baby” and “Madame Celestin’s Divorce, ” continue to be widely anthologized.
In 1899 Chopin published The Awakening, a realistic novel about the sexual and artistic awakening of a young wife and mother who abandons her family and eventually commits suicide. This work was roundly condemned in its time because of its sexual frankness and its portrayal of an interracial marriage and went out of print for more than 50 years. When it was rediscovered in the 1950s, critics marveled at the beauty of its writing and its modern sensibility.

Table of contents

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• Introduction