Start gifting
Libro.fm for Business
Start a membership, get two free audiobooks
Bookseller Created
Feminist Classics
Celebrate indie bookstores with our limited-time sale!
Shop the sale
Send as gift
Add to Wish List
Almost ready!
In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.
Log in Create account
Shop the sale
In celebration of Independent Bookstore Day, shop our limited-time sale on bestselling audiobooks from April 22nd-28th. Don’t miss out—purchases support your local bookstore!
Shop nowThe Awakening
Narrator
Grace Conlin
This audiobook uses AI narration.
We’re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.
Learn more
Length
4 hours 51 minutes
Language
English
First published in 1899, this revolutionary novel so disturbed critics and the public that it was banished for decades afterward. Now widely read and admired, The Awakening has been hailed as an early vision of woman's emancipation. Rooted in the romantic tradition of Melville and Dickinson, it is the story of twenty-eight-year-old Edna Pontellier, a surprisingly modern woman trapped in a dehumanizing marriage and in search of self-discovery. Turning away from convention and society toward her primal instincts for passion and freedom, Edna abandons her family to realize herself as an individual. But her quest leads to her destruction by a society that grants no place for those unfulfilled by marriage and motherhood.
Set in New Orleans and the Southern Louisiana coast, The Awakeningis one of the most important novels written by an American woman in the nineteenth century and a landmark work of early feminism.
Kate Chopin (1851–1901) was born Katherine O’Flaherty in St. Louis in 1851. She was a popular social belle, admired for her wit and beauty. In 1871 she married Oscar Chopin and lived in Louisiana until his sudden death in 1882. Chopin began writing about the Creole and Cajun people in the South, gaining acclaim for her finely crafted short stories. Upon publication in 1899, her now-classic novel The Awakening was widely condemned for its controversial themes, and Chopin was devastated by its harsh critical reception. She died in 1904, denied in her lifetime the recognition she desperately wanted and richly deserved.
Grace Conlin (1962–1997) was the recording name of Grainne Cassidy, an award-winning actress and acclaimed narrator. She was a member of the Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in Washington, DC, and won a Helen Hayes Award in 1988 for her role in Woolly Mammoth’s production of Savage in Limbo.
Featured in these playlists...
Reviews
“Exquisite and sensitive…iridescent.”
“Beautifully written.”
“Kate Chopin was long before her time in dealing with sexual passion…and the personal emotions of women.”
“Interesting and timely…Chopin’s oracular feminism and prophetic psychology almost outweigh her estimable literary talents.”
“Chopin shares the boldness in technical experiment and moral relativism of her contemporaries in the 1890s…a writer of considerable sensibility and talent…in her stories she worked for breadth. In height, however, and depth, it is The Awakening that will serve as her passport into our time and posterity.”
“Her story is a tragedy and one of many clarion calls in its day to examine the institution of marriage and woman’s opportunities in an oppressive world.”
“[A] poignant spiritual tragedy.”
Expand reviews