"The thing about Stein, our dear friend Gertrude, is she made a lot of things possible. Changed what language could be, and what grammar could be. Didn’t give a shit about the rules of language and lived with her boo when people really hated lesbians." - Gabrielle Welsh
"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.
