Awakening

In 1899, Kate Chopin dared to write about a woman's body as a site of knowledge, not just ornament. Edna Pontellier is thirty-two, married to a kind man, mother to two boys, and utterly adrift. On a Louisiana summer, she begins to understand that her life has been lived for everyone else's comfort, and that knowing this might destroy her. Chopin's prose is deceptively quiet, but what she describes is revolutionary: a woman refusing the terms society has offered her, even when she cannot imagine what life on her own terms would look like. The novel builds toward an ending of terrible clarity, Edna walking into the ocean, the water both tomb and womb. More than a century later, The Awakening remains a lightning rod: uncomfortable, unflinching in its insistence that women's lives contain multitudes they are rarely permitted to name. This book is for readers who want to understand why feminism had to happen, and why it still does.