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objectionable about The Awakening was the author’s apparent unwillingness to condemn her protagonist’s unconventional choices. Indeed, many reviews expressed concern with the moral constitution of its central character. “If the author had secured our sympathy for this unpleasant person it would not have been a small victory,” wrote a reviewer for Public Opinion in June 1899, “but we are well satisfied when Mrs. Pontellier deliberately swims out to her death in the waters of the gulf.” Others concurred, finding little grounds for identification with Edna’s plight. A piece in The Nation dismissively summarized the novel’s plot, “‘The Awakening’ is a sad story of a Southern lady who wanted to do what she wanted to. From wanting to, she did, with disastrous consequences; but as she swims out to sea in the end, it is to be hoped that her example may lie for ever undredged. It is with high expectation that we open the volume, remembering the author’s agreeable short stories, and with real disappointment that we close it.” Given such evidence, it is not surprising that The Awakening has been mythologized as a scandal in its own time. It is certainly true that many of Chopin’s contemporaries decried the actions of her independently minded protagonist, and that others expressed disappointment at the novel’s departure from the charming local color of her previous fiction. However, these facts have led critics to exaggerate the negativity of reactions to The Awakening, and their consequences for Chopin herself.

Indeed, a number of reviews recognized the novel’s artistic accomplishment. Charles Deyo, exchange editor for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, enthused: “There may be many opinions touching other aspects of Mrs. Chopin’s novel ‘The Awakening,’ but all must concede its flawless art.” Compared with her previous publications, he detected a newfound confidence in its pages: “There is no uncertainty in the lines, so surely and firmly drawn. Complete mastery is apparent on every page. Nothing is wanting to make a complete artistic whole. In delicious English, quick with life, never a word too much, simple and pure, the story proceeds with classic severity through a labyrinth of doubt and temptation to dumb despair.” The New York Times Saturday Review of Books and Art concurred, praising Chopin for her bold approach to controversial topics: “The author has a clever way of managing a difficult subject, and wisely tempers the emotional elements found in the situation.”

Nancy Walker has observed that emphasis on The Awakening’s scandalous reception is linked to several other myths about the end of Chopin’s life. The first is that Chopin was ostracized by St. Louis society and that her book was banned from libraries. In truth, her most recent biographer, Emily Toth, notes that “the Mercantile Library and the St. Louis Public Library both bought multiple copies and kept them on the shelves until they wore out.” Nor is it the case, as a second myth suggests, that negative reactions to The Awakening drove Chopin into authorial paralysis. She lived only four years after its publication and, although she struggled to find venues for publishing her work, she continued to write and circulate short stories until her death.

It is true, however, that The Awakening was not fully appreciated until its rediscovery half a century later by a new generation of readers, who acknowledged its considerable formal sophistication and the complexity of its characterization. The publication of two major works by Norwegian scholar Per Seyersted—Kate Chopin: A Critical Biography and The Complete Works of Kate Chopin—inaugurated the reassessment of Chopin’s career that would establish her firmly within the annals of American literary history. It is no accident that surging interest in Chopin in the early 1970s coincided with the emergence of feminist criticism, which sought to bring overlooked authors into the literary canon and to reevaluate themes and locations trivialized by earlier generations of critics because of their association with women writers. While