The Awakening and Selected Stories (Warbler Classics)

Kate Chopins 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 societys unleashing of female desire. Celebrated today as a key text in American literature it scandalized early critics and precisely because of its boldness jeopardized Chopins career. In this annotated modernized edition-specially tailored for twenty-first-century readers-Rafael Walker highlights Chopins awareness of the privileged classs exploitation of the the less-privileged and includes a number of neglected stories that foreground Chopins feminist proclivities.