Kate Chopin

Edna Pontellier is married, twenty-eight, and at a crossroads in her life. She is passionate and artistic but has no one who understands her deep yearnings. She jumps at the chance to spend a summer away from her husband and the heat of New Orleans at a small coastal retreat.
Enveloped by a small circle of friends, she begins to throw off the strictures of the 1890s bourgeoisie. Stepwise, Edna renounces her obligations, takes a lover, and is propelled...

When first published in 1899, charges of sordidness and immorality consigned The Awakening into initial obscurity and irreparably damaged its author's literary and social reputation. In her introduction, Sandra M. Gilbert considers the issues explored in the novel and the stories from their growth out of the feminist literary tradition of the nineteenth century to their place among other concerns of fin de siècle writers in America and England.

The poignant story of a woman who pursues love outside of her restrictive marriage in turn-of-the-century New Orleans.

Collects twenty short horror stories published between 1816 and 1914 that have been overshadowed by the works of Edgar Allan Poe, including Bram Stoker's "The Squaw" and L.T. Meade's "The Woman with the Hood."