The Awakening and Selected Stories (Warbler Classics)

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 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."Offers readers her most intriguing stories along with her masterwork The Awakening. Filled with rich insights, Rafael Walker's splendid introduction?...distills Chopin's lasting literary achievement."--Nancy Bentley, author of Frantic Panoramas: American Literature and Mass Culture 1870-1920"Rafael Walker's insightful introduction brings forward the complexities of The Awakening's portrayal of a turn-of-the-century woman's striving toward freedom, and the inclusion of some fascinating lesser-known stories provides a rich sense of the breadth of Chopin's achievement."--Jennifer Fleissner, author of Women, Compulsion, Modernity: The Moment of American Naturalism