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Psychology & SocietyThe Awakening, and Selected Short StoriesKate ChopinThe Awakening, and Selected Short Stories

The Awakening, and Selected Short Stories

Kate Chopin

Psychology & SocietyEnglish
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Edna Pontellier, twenty-eight, the wife of a prosperous New Orleans businessman and the mother of two boys, spends the summer at Grand Isle on the Gulf of…

Catalogue details

Author
Kate Chopin
Category
Psychology & Society
Language
English
Source
Project Gutenberg

About this book

Edna Pontellier, twenty-eight, the wife of a prosperous New Orleans businessman and the mother of two boys, spends the summer at Grand Isle on the Gulf of Mexico. There, among Creole families, she learns to swim, falls in love with the young Robert Lebrun and begins to feel that her life as a wife and mother is not her own. Back in the city she moves into a small house of her own, paints, has an affair, and listens to the pianist Mademoiselle Reisz, who warns her that the bird that would soar must have strong wings. The volume adds eight of Kate Chopin's short stories, among them 'Désirée's Baby', with its devastating ending about race.

Context and significance

Chopin published The Awakening in 1899, and reviewers condemned it as morbid and immoral; she wrote little afterwards and died in 1904. Rediscovered in the 1960s, it is now one of the most widely taught American novels. Edna is often compared with the heroine of Flaubert's Madame Bovary.

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