The Awakening

Kate Chopin’s absorbing 1899 novel The Awakening tells the story of Edna Pontellier, a married woman in New Orleans who, during a summer holiday, begins to question her conventional life. In this path-breaking novel, Chopin speculates more daringly than any before her about the consequences for middle-class women of late-nineteenth-century society’s unleashing of female desire. Celebrated today as a key text in American literature, it scandalized early critics and, precisely because of its boldness,  jeopardized Chopin’s career. In this annotated, modernized edition—specially tailored for twenty-first-century readers—Rafael Walker highlights Chopin’s awareness of the privileged class’s exploitation of the the less-privileged, and includes a number of neglected stories that foreground Chopin’s feminist proclivities.

Kate Chopin (1850–1904) was born in St. Louis and spent much of her life in Louisiana. Widowed with six children at age thirty-two, she published stories and articles often set in the Creole culture of late-nineteenth-century New Orleans. The candor and sympathy with which she explored the contours of modern women’s lives were unprecedented. So prescient were Chopin’s fictions that, many decades after her death, they would become touchstones for second-wave feminism.

Rafael Walker is Assistant Professor of English at Baruch College, City University of New York. He has published on a wide range of topics in American literature, including Kate Chopin’s fiction.