In the Library
The Awakening
Kate Chopin, 1899
- Form
- Form Novella
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 3.5 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 1
- Length
- Length 49k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
I would give up the unessential; I would give my money, I would give my life for my children; but I wouldn't give myself.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
Madame Bovary
Gustave Flaubert
Flaubert writes the same woman waking to desire in a world that punishes it, but Emma reaches for arsenic where Edna reaches for the sea.
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Anna Karenina
Leo Tolstoy
Tolstoy gives the same awakening a thousand pages and a train, and the sympathy is greater but the ending just as final.
£1.99
A Doll's House
Henrik Ibsen
Ibsen's Nora slams the door Edna swims through: the same refusal, different elements.
£1.99
About the book
The Gulf is warm as bathwater the night Edna Pontellier swims out past where her feet can find the sand, and something in her that has been asleep for twenty-eight years sits up and takes notice. She has been a wife on Esplanade Street and a mother to two boys who barely need her, dutiful in the way Creole society requires, and she has never once asked what she wants. That night in the water, she finds out. Kate Chopin gives her music that undoes her, a married man she has no business loving, a painter's ambition she no longer troubles to hide, then lets her want all three without apologizing for it. The prose is as clear and cool as the water itself, never straining, never pleading its case. By the end Edna is back in the sea alone, and the same current that first woke her is the one she finally trusts completely.