Three Classics by American Women: The Awakening; Ethan Frome; O Pioneers!

by Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather

In one volume, readers now have access to three classic novels by outstanding American women authors.

THE AWAKENING by Kate Chopin
Jean Stafford wrote, "Kate Chopin was long before her time in dealing with sexual passion...and the personal emotions of women." The Awakening, which shocked its contemporary critics in 1899, is now considered a masterpiece, a novel that traces a woman's growing sensuality, search for identity, and final self-destruction--in a drama played out against the sultry climate and insulated culture of Creole New Orleans.

ETHAN FROME by Edith Wharton
"There are only three or four American novelists who can be thought of as 'major' and Edith Wharton is one", wrote Gore Vidal. In Ethan Frome, her most popular novel, Wharton tells a tragic story of thwarted love with irony and bitterness that seems to reflect the author's own dissatisfaction with twentieth-century American values.

O PIONEERS! by Willa Cather
Rebecca West called Willa Cather "the most sensuous of writers" because of her evocative descriptions of American life. Cather's magnificent tale of the Nebraska prairie, O Pioneers!, portrays a woman of strong will and even stronger desire to overcome adversity, bringing to life the prairie landscape in lush, provocative colors.

404 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published March 1, 1990

About the author

Kate Chopin was an American author whose fiction grew out of the complex cultures and contradictions of Louisiana life, and she gradually became one of the most distinctive voices in nineteenth century literature. Raised in a household shaped by strong women of French and Irish heritage, she developed an early love for books and storytelling, and that immersion in language later shaped the quiet precision of her prose. After marrying and moving to New Orleans, then later to the small community of Cloutierville, she absorbed the rhythms, customs, and tensions of Creole and Cajun society, finding in its people the material that would feed both her sympathy and her sharp observational eye. When personal loss left her searching for direction, she began writing with the encouragement of a family friend, discovering not only a therapeutic outlet but a genuine vocation. Within a few years, her stories appeared in major magazines such as The Atlantic Monthly, Vogue, and The Century, where readers encountered her local-color sketches, her portrayals of women navigating desire and constraint, and her nuanced depictions of life in the American South. She published two story collections, Bayou Folk and A Night in Acadie, introducing characters whose emotional lives were depicted with unusual honesty. Her short fiction often explored subjects others avoided, including interracial relationships, female autonomy, and the quiet but powerful inner conflicts of everyday people. That same unflinching quality shaped The Awakening, the novel that would later become her most celebrated work. At the time of its publication, however, its frank treatment of a married woman’s emotional and sensual awakening unsettled many critics, who judged it harshly, yet Chopin continued to write stories that revealed her commitment to portraying women as fully human, with desires and ambitions that stretched beyond the confines of convention. She admired the psychological clarity of Guy de Maupassant, but she pushed beyond his influence to craft a voice that was unmistakably her own, direct yet lyrical, and deeply attuned to the inner lives of her characters. Though some of her contemporaries viewed her themes as daring or even improper, others recognized her narrative skill, and within a decade of her passing she was already being described as a writer of remarkable talent. Her rediscovery in the twentieth century led readers to appreciate how modern her concerns truly were: the struggle for selfhood, the tension between social expectations and private longing, and the resilience of women seeking lives that felt authentically theirs. Today, her stories and novels are widely read, admired for their clarity, emotional intelligence, and the boldness with which they illuminate the complexities of human experience.

Reviews

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

I got this book in college, but only read The Awakening. I just finished reading Ethan Frome and O Pioneers! Ethan Frome is a terribly depressing story, reminiscent of Jane Eyre. I've read a couple other novels by Wharton that I enjoyed much more than this one.

I enjoyed O Pioneers! much more than Ethan Frome, though not nearly as much as My Antonia, which I recently read as well.

These are classics, and students of American literature should be sure to read these.