The Awakening
A woman on holiday at a Louisiana resort learns to swim, falls in love, and begins to understand how little of her life belongs to her. Chopin wrote the novel in a precise, sensuous prose that was unlike anything else in American fiction of 1899.
It was condemned on publication and then forgotten for decades, which is part of its history. The ending is not a punishment imposed by the author but a consequence of a society that offers Edna no way to live as she has begun to want. Read it in one sitting if you can.
Public-domain status
First published in 1899. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Kate Chopin died in 1904, so this work has been free to republish there since 1975.
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- Project Gutenberg, ebook no. 160 — plain text, EPUB and Kindle, checked by us
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Keep reading
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