The Awakening and Selected Stories

What it is about

Kate Chopin’s novel follows Edna Pontellier as marriage, motherhood, desire, art, and social expectation become newly visible and intolerable. The selected stories extend Chopin’s interest in gender, region, race, class, interiority, and the limited choices available to women in the nineteenth-century American South. I need this book close whenever I start thinking the question has become simple.

Why I keep it

A woman waking up. It ends the way it had to.

Key ideas

Beside it on the shelf · Literature & Fiction