The Awakening and Selected Stories (Penguin Classics) by Kate Chopin (27-Sep-1984) Paperback

by Kate Chopin

Genres: Fiction, Classics

Paperback

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

[Paige Greene · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was going to reread just The Awakening because something reminded me of it recently. I read it once when I was 16 (after my English teacher had us read Chopin’s short story “The Story of an Hour,” also in this book) and I didn’t really like it then. So I found it on Internet Archive and started reading and then happened upon this collection in a used bookstore when I was halfway through it. I’m glad I did! Excellent stories.

Chopin writes with a sort of a fin de séacle, southern gothic vibe. Her stories are richly symbolic and subversive. A woman in the late 1800s questions the sanctity of marriage and motherhood, and has affairs, and embraces the nihilism reserved in that age for men. Another feels glee at her loving husband’s death because it means freedom. Another spends a sum on herself instead of on her children. Black people living lives of poverty and servitude have full, rich, complicated romances and devoted platonic loves. One story about nuns reads to me like a lesbian romance, though I doubt Chopin meant for it to be read that way.


I also really liked about these stories that many of the characters remind me of people I have known - strange, given that over 100 years have passed since they were published. Chopin writes about these people in such a tender and human way that you can’t help but love them even when they’re vain and capricious.

[Sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a book! Some elements are a little bit shocking today, so it's hard to imagine the reception in 1899 (spoiler alert: it was not received well). I've read English novels written by Victorian women, but fewer American texts from the same time period and even fewer from the South. The New Orleans/Gulf Coast area is much more than just a setting here--it is omnipresent, with unique cultural and natural aspects that affect the characters and story profoundly. So that creates a strikingly different reading experience, and then there's just all that uninhibited women's liberation. But one thing that this novel has in common with others of its time is that eventually, the text has to force some sort of containment upon itself. Or is it exactly the opposite here? This short book definitely made an impression.

[Heather Thomas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lovely stories using Creole and Acadian dialects. enjoying the character's journeys to self awareness

[Bayphextwin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Four stars for The Awakening on its own. Beautifully written and ahead of its time. There are some absurdly beautiful lines and excerpts in this story that I was not expecting at all. This surprised and delighted me and I’m glad to have read it :) I’ve been exceptionally lazy at these reviews lately but I really loved this. The setting, the language, the musings on identity and revelation, just lovely and hit very deep for me.

Three stars for the collection as a whole. The strongest stories in this (besides The Awakening) were definitely the ones with similar motifs to The Awakening (female independence/individuality) and the ones where Chopin’s knowledge/description of southern setting/dialect/society are most apparent. Chopin is a southern writer, and when she leans into that identity she is absolutely at her most powerful. Her physical descriptions of the American South and her ability to capture its atmosphere within her stories is both sublime and incredibly affecting.

Edit: the awakening has really stuck with me… like to the point of almost wanting to give it five stars. So I think I will increase this rating to 4 stars overall.