Background

Although Kate Chopin lived in St. Louis, Missouri, for most of her life, the few years that she spent in Louisiana profoundly influenced her writing career, which lasted from about 1888 to 1902.

Her Work

Her best-known work, The Awakening (1899), created a sensation in its day by depicting a woman whose dissatisfaction with her role in society leads her to seek a life independent of her husband and children. The short novel was nearly forgotten for more than fifty years until feminist scholars in the late twentieth century championed Chopin's work as a courageous declaration of women's sexual and spiritual yearnings.

The Awakening

The Awakening tells the story of 28-year-old Edna, a Kentuckian married to 40-year-old French Creole Leonce Pontellier, a New Orleans businessman. The novel opens as Edna and her two young sons are summering along the Gulf of Mexico at Grand Isle, in beachfront cottages owned by Madame Lebrun from New Orleans, where “exclusive visitors enabled [Madame Lebrun] to maintain the easy and comfortable existence which appeared to be her birthright.”