"Read together, the reflections of the Nobel women reveal a range of ideas about what literature can do and a sense of a practitioner's responsibility to these ideas. While the lectures vary widely in content-from Lessing's and Gordimer's concrete political lessons to Szymborska's larger abstract musings to fables personal (Müller) and universal (Morrison)-each contains observations that are at once totally complex and recognizably true." - Jessi Haley
"Passion’s necessity may be one of the lessons we can take from Chopin’s controversial text, but certainly it is not the only lesson. The novel emerged from obscurity like a different kind of storm: taking the literary world to new heights and awareness of what women writers could do." - Heather Ostman
Kate Chopin's 1899 novel tells the story of Edna Pontellier as she seeks to expand her life beyond the boundaries of Creole society and the restrictive expectations for wives and mothers. Called everything from "poison" to ""not altogether wholesome in its tendencies" upon publication, The Awakening is now recognized as a classic of feminist literature that also laid the stylistic foundation for modernist Southern fiction.
