The Awakening

The novel expresses women's diffuse desire for personal and social change

Guardian

Chopin's slight, brittle and fierce novel became a classic and a cult, shocking readers with its candid and unsentimental portrait of marital infidelity. Though the subject has lost its power to outrage, the novel has not, it remains delicately bitter and acidly angry

Observer

The Awakening is indeed a remarkable achievement, not least because of its rhapsodic ending

Independent

Chopin cuts closer to the core of her heroine's feelings... The great power of The Awakening resides not in the answers it provides, but in the questions it exposes

Washington Post

It doesn't seem so daring now, but it's an inspiring model of personal crusading. Written in lyrical, restrained prose, this is not only a historical document of writer ahead of her time, but an enduringly good read.

Scotsman