The Awakening, and Selected Short Stories

About the book

In The Awakening, Edna Pontellier begins to experience desires and capacities that do not fit comfortably within her expected identity as a wife and mother. Summer company, music, friendship, and the physical freedom of swimming sharpen questions that ordinary domestic routines have kept indistinct. Chopin follows the difficulty of making an inward change into a sustainable outward life, without treating a newly recognised wish as a complete solution. This volume also includes short stories such as Désirée's Baby and A Pair of Silk Stockings, offering further encounters with social judgment, longing, and constraint. The collection's force lies in its attention to experiences that conventional explanations make easy to dismiss. Small choices and moments of perception open onto much larger questions about belonging and autonomy.

• Autonomy
• Desire and convention
• Women's lives

Why read it

For precise, evocative writing about inward changes that familiar social roles cannot readily accommodate.

Novel with selected short stories · English text