Kate Chopin’s absorbing 1899 novel The Awakening tells the story of Edna Pontellier, a married woman in New Orleans who, during a summer holiday, begins to question her conventional life. In this path-breaking novel, Chopin speculates more daringly than any before her about the consequences for middle-class women of late-nineteenth-century society’s unleashing of female desire. Celebrated today as a key text in American literature, it scandalized early critics and, precisely because of its boldness, jeopardized Chopin’s career. In this annotated, modernized edition-specially tailored for twenty-first-century readers-Rafael Walker highlights Chopin’s awareness of the privileged class’s exploitation of the the less-privileged, and includes a number of neglected stories that foreground Chopin’s feminist proclivities.