Readers and critics were scandalized by The Awakening when it was first published, but it is now regarded as among the boldest and earliest examples of feminist fiction. It is published here with a selection of Chopin’s strikingly perceptive short stories and introduced by Dr J. Michelle Coghlan, a specialist in American literature.Part of the Macmillan Collector’s Library; a series of stunning, clothbound, pocket-sized classics with gold foiled edges and ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover. In The Awakening, Edna Pontellier is on holiday with her husband and two young children at a sleepy resort town on the Louisiana Gulf Coast. There, she is pursued by the charming and unmarried Robert Lebrun. Edna doesn’t play by the rules; flirtation turns into an affair that awakens in Edna her desire to break away from her passionless marriage, her children and the strict conventions of nineteenth-century society.

From the first pages of The Awakening we are pulled into territory that feels utterly current and familiar, with an undercurrent more dangerous than romantic comedy, Kate Chopin is a pioneer in the treatment of sexuality in American literature . . . She does not speak only to women, but she speaks most powerfully about them, A Creole Bovary is this little novel of Miss Chopin’s, Chopin’s deceptively slight novel is the kind of book revolutions are made of, This landmark feminist novel, first published in 1899, remains startlingly relevant

Kate Chopin was born in St. Louis in 1850 to a Creole mother and an Irish father. Educated at St Louis’ Sacred Heart Academy, Chopin went on to reject her Catholic faith and embraced a free-thinking philosophy inspired by writers such as Darwin and Huxley. In 1870 she married Oscar Chopin, who died in 1882 of yellow fever. A widow at only thirty-two with six children, she eventually moved home to St Louis where she began writing fiction. She completed three novels and close to one hundred short stories which were published in prominent magazines such as Atlantic Monthly and Vogue. She died in 1904.