The Awakening: Original and Unabridged

The Awakening, by Kate Chopin, is set in New Orleans and the Southern Louisiana coast at the end of the nineteenth century. Edna Pontellier struggles to reconcile her increasingly unorthodox views on femininity and motherhood with the prevailing social attitudes of the turn-of-the-century American South.

It is one of the earliest American novels that focuses on women's issues without condescension and is also widely seen as a landmark work of early feminism, generating mixed reaction from co...