I had never heard of this author till 2 weeks ago when I bought the paperback version at the big box book store. I wanted a summer read.This was a lifetime read. It WILL be one of the few books I will re-read over and over.
Edna married for society's obligation and social status. She didn't marry for love.She did not have the options we do in 2008. Every young woman should read this before marrying.When we don't live true to ourselves and life's purpose, we are never happy or content.
Edna's journey to "self" was selfish at times, but none the less, once the journey starts there is no going back. The ending could have happened whether she stayed or not.
I found myself chuckling in many parts and realizing these were the scandalous parts 100 years ago.
I loved the conversation between her husband and doctor.Their masculine naivete'.
There were so many paragraphs that I read many times, just to luxuriate in her use of words.
This story surrounds you and does not let you go.
I am reading the book that is her complete works by Library of America.
I can only imagine if alive today, how she would shock us now, but not to generations 100 hundred years from now.
This book ended her career as a writer. Terrible price to pay but thankfully her work survived so we could enjoy it.

Quite an author, a woman and feminist!
( )

While I acquired this Kindle book because The Awakening is on the Guardian's 1000 Novels Everyone Should Read list, it was the short stories that really captured me and boosted this book up a ½ star. The lovely descriptions gave me the feeling of the French Creole presence in Louisiana in the period during and just after the American Civil War and Chopin's women, while quite different from me & my friends, still felt real to me. The prose reminded me a bit of Willa Cather's writing.

The novella The Awakening I found melancholy in the same way that Anna Karenina and Mrs. Dalloway were. The story has a lot in common with Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary & some other classics of this time; I can see that when it was first published in 1899 it might have been thought shocking or daring. However, just as with Anna, I found the main character Edna more annoying than sympathetic (although Edna was nowhere near as annoying as Anna!). I was much more sympathetic to Robert! I guess this is one instance to which my modern sensibilities just can't really relate. ( )

Brief tales of women's restlessness unleashed. Recommended reading except for 2 pages. I'll let you figure out which 2 I'm talking about. ( )

One of my favorite books and novellas of all time, a very powerful and feminine examination of one woman's dissatisfaction with her existence and the terms of it, and how she is treated. Inexplicably beautiful and meaningful to me. ( )

Rating: 1.5* of five, all for a few pleasantly turned descriptions

The Publisher Says: This story of a woman's struggle with oppressive social structures received much public contempt at its first release; put aside because of initial controversy, the novel gained popularity in the 1960s, some six decades after its first publication, and has since remained a favorite of many readers. Chopin's depiction of a married woman, bound to her family and with no way to assert a fulfilling life of her own, has become a foundation for feminism and a classic account of gender crises in the late Victorian era.

My Review: Tedious. Nothing at all worth calling a classic considered as a piece of writing; as a work of characterization; or in any way that I can discern.

Edna is awakened by her desire for a man not her husband? And this is a feminist classic? That she then sends away her children to live with her mother-in-law and waves a vaguely affectionate good-bye to her husband as he moves away for ~6 months vitiates any sense of conflict or in fact of what the hell this boring broad is on about when she rattles around New Orleans painting (well enough to sell her work) and conducting the most desultory possible affair with a man so louche that he's a by-word for bad boyish nonsense...and not one word of gossip, not one scintilla of contumely, not a scrap of opprobrium appears to attach itself to her?! IN NEW ORELANS?!

Folks, this is so incredible that I am gobsmacked. That's the gossipiest little burg in the Western world. People who don't know you know you there.Spend a week and there's some hear-tell about what you gettin' up to. Only tourists are anonymous, sort of, and that's pretty much a recent phenomenon.

Nothing outside tedious, bland Edna's direct view is allowed any reality; no character exists except as a bald description; the action is reported much as it would be in a telegram of old, or a tweet of today, stripped to mere outlines to make it fit in as few words as possible.

I've read worse books, much worse books in fact, but few that were so devoid of characterization. Why on earth anyone ever invested an erg of emotional energy in these silhouettes is beyond my ken. Pelletier, Edna's husband, does exactly nothing interesting and she herself feels no animosity towards him because she interacts with him not at all. How they came to have two children is beyond me. I suppose, in the indirect language of the time, she is shown to reject his sexual advances. So? Wives do that a lot. Especially then, before adequate birth control was available. He doesn't appear to make an issue of it, and she just...doesn't.

Her children are left to the nurse unless she breaks free of the fog of indifference shrouding her every action and perception. So? Do something, Kate Chopin, to show me what effect this has on two little boys! As it is they're pawns on the chaotic chess board of this book. Someone who watched a few games of chess and tried to emulate it without troubling to learn the rules or understand the conventions is the closest analogue I can find to the impression the book leaves with me.

Chopin read a few stories, then figured she'd write her own before understanding the demands of characterization, the need for motivations, the purpose of creating a setting...this is what I am left with. I've honestly never felt so at sea when reading a lauded classic as to why it attained the status. I detest Dickens' books, each and every one I've read, but I know why others love the verbose, tortured melodramas. Even Hemingway's pustulent, suppurating psychic wounds made for some moments of humor, and explained his enduring appeal to some people.

This? This has nothing that grand or that icksome to offer. It really offers next to nothing. It can't be hated, that's like hating seltzer water. I can't imagine a less captivating way to spend a snowy Sunday afternoon. ( )