The Awakening

In 1890s New Orleans, a wife and mother begins to ask what she actually wants from her own life. Edna Pontellier has the trappings of a successful woman's existence, a kind husband, children, a beautiful home, but something unnamed is stirring beneath the surface. As she forms a forbidden friendship, discovers a passion for painting, and allows herself to feel desires that have no place in her society, she moves toward a choice that the world will not forgive. Kate Chopin wrote this novel in 1899 and it was nearly lost to history, dismissed as immoral upon publication. A century later, it stands as one of the earliest American novels to take a woman's inner life seriously, to suggest that marriage and motherhood might not be enough, that a woman might be more than the roles she's assigned. Chopin's prose is precise and unsentimental, revealing the quiet violence of a world that asks women to disappear. This is a book about the cost of conformity and the terrible freedom of refusing to pay it.