Awakening

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 <i>The Awakening</i> 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 senses<i>The Awakening</i> 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 <i>The Awakening</i> also includes a selection of short stories by Kate Chopin. <p/>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.