Kate Chopin: Complete Novels and Stories Hardback - 2002

The explosive novel At Fault (1890) centers on a love triangle between a strong-willed young widow, a stiff St. Louis businessman, and the man's alcoholic wife. In the two story collections Bayou Folk (1894) and A Night in Acadie (1897), Chopin transforms the popular local color sketch into taut, perfectly calibrated tales that portray Louisiana bayou cultures with sympathetic insight and an eye to the unresolved conflicts of a South reeling from the Civil War.

In The Awakening (1899), the novel that scandalized many of her contemporaries and effectively ended her public career as a writer, Chopin tells the story of Edna Pontellier, a restless, unsatisfied woman who embarks on a quixotic search for fulfillment. Rendered with masterful precision, detachment, and a suggestive ambiguity that defies easy judgments about Edna's actions, The Awakening is the novel that restored Chopin to literary prominence after its rediscovery by critics in the 1960s and 1970s.

The volume also includes all the stories not collected by Chopin, including those meant for A Vocation and a Voice, a projected volume that her publisher canceled in 1900; stories that Chopin never tried to publish, such as the erotically daring "The Storm"; and "Ti Frre," "A Horse Story," and "Alexandre's Wonderful Experience," three stories which were found in 1992 in a long-lost cache of Chopin's papers.

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