LitMinds Book Club: The Awakening
October 14 @ 6:30 pm - 8:00 pm CDT
Free
Join us as we read The Awakening by Kate Chopin.
“The great power of The Awakening resides not in the answers it provides, but in the questions it exposes.” —Washington Post
“Kate Chopin . . . smoked and went hatless and played cards into the small hours; she wrote stories about venereal disease, adultery, divorce and the ‘monstrous joy’ of widowhood . . . scandalous in her own age; held up as a heroine by feminists of the Seventies.” —Observer
First published in 1899, this beautiful, brief novel so disturbed critics and the public that it was banished for decades afterward.
On vacation in Grand Isle, Louisiana, a married woman falls in love with a charming, attentive young man. The relationship spurs Edna Pontellier to explore her longing for independence and creative fulfillment. It also compels her to defy conventions, rejecting the constraints of marriage and motherhood.
First published in 1899, this beautiful, brief novel so disturbed critics and the public that it was banished for decades afterward. Now widely read and admired, The Awakening has been hailed as an early vision of women’s emancipation. This sensuous book tells of a woman’s abandonment of her family, her seduction, and her awakening to desires and passions that threatened to consumer her. Originally entitled A Solitary Soul, this portrait of twenty-eight-year-old Edna Pontellier is a landmark in American fiction, rooted firmly in the romantic tradition of Herman Melville and Emily Dickinson.
About the Author
Born and raised in St. Louis, Kate Chopin (1850-1904) moved to Louisiana to marry the son of a cotton grower. A mother of six by the age of twenty-eight and a widow at thirty-two, she turned to writing to support her young family. She is best known today for The Awakening (1899), a portrait of marriage and motherhood so controversial it fell out of print shortly after publication and was not rediscovered until the 1960s.
