The Awakening by Kate Chopin: Free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB Download
The Awakening
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Chapter I: a parrot, a beach, and a husband’s newspaper
A green and yellow parrot, which hung in a cage outside the door, kept repeating over and over:
“Allez vous-en! Allez vous-en! Sapristi! That’s all right!”
He could speak a little Spanish, and also a language which nobody understood, unless it was the mocking-bird that hung on the other side of the door, whistling his fluty notes out upon the breeze with maddening persistence.
The page shows the opening of Chapter I; the rest of the novel’s thirty-nine chapters and all eight stories continue in the free EPUB, AZW3 and KEPUB editions below.
Download Full EPUB1899
~67,000 words (estimated)
Approx. 3.7 hours
Standalone
Grand Isle, the Chênière Caminada, and Esplanade Street, New Orleans
Chapters I–XXXIX, plus eight stories
EPUB · AZW3 · KEPUB
0.23 MB (EPUB) · 0.35 MB (AZW3) · 0.26 MB (KEPUB)
Public domain in the United States
Project Gutenberg
The Awakening is Kate Chopin’s 1899 novel of Edna Pontellier, twenty-eight, summering at Grand Isle on the Louisiana coast with a husband she does not love and two small sons she loves unevenly. There she learns to swim, paints, listens to Mademoiselle Reisz play Chopin and falls into an infatuation with Robert Lebrun, a young Creole who is always about to leave for Mexico. The summer restlessness becomes a winter refusal: of her husband’s Tuesday receptions, of her marriage, of the assumption that a woman’s life is owed to other people. She is not a mother-woman, and the novel never pretends otherwise. The Awakening is short, exact and unsentimental about what freedom costs.
Chopin wrote the book in a few months, published it in April 1899, and then watched it go quiet: a St. Louis library pulled it from the shelves, reviewers called it sordid, and she wrote little fiction afterwards. It was recovered in the 1960s, when readers began to see Edna’s last swim as one of the frankest endings in American fiction. This download carries the complete novel and eight of Chopin’s Louisiana stories, all from one 1899 text. It is a short book and a hard one to shake. The text is available via Project Gutenberg #160.
The Awakening by Kate Chopin: Summary, Characters & Themes
This summary and analysis of The Awakening follows Edna Pontellier through one Louisiana summer and the New Orleans winter that loosens her marriage. Kate Chopin was forty-nine when the novel appeared in April 1899: a St. Louis widow with six children, two collections of stories behind her, and a decade of writing about Creole Louisiana. The book runs to thirty-nine untitled chapters and about 49,000 words, and it moves with a story writer’s economy. A parrot on a gallery, a husband’s day-old newspaper, a first swim, a dinner party, a note left where it will be found. The prose is plain and quick and the scenes that matter are small ones. Reviewers in 1899 found the book sordid; it took sixty years for those small scenes to be read as a whole life. It is also an exact novel about a marriage in which nothing dramatic happens until everything does.
Grand Isle is a summer colony of Creole families from New Orleans, and its social weather is exact: the men go over to Klein’s hotel for billiards, the women sew, the children are handed to nurses, and a young man may devote a whole summer to a married woman’s amusement without anyone calling it an affair. Robert Lebrun, a clerk in a mercantile house, has been the devoted attendant of some fair dame every summer since he was fifteen. Adèle Ratignolle, the embodiment of every womanly grace and charm, is held up as the mother-woman Edna is not. Edna sketches her friend like some sensuous Madonna, listens to her talk of babies, and begins to notice a dual life in herself, the outward one that conforms and the inward one that questions. The summer teaches her desire before it teaches her anything else; the sea and Adèle’s hand on hers do the same work.
The New Orleans winter is where the refusal hardens. Edna stops keeping her husband’s Tuesday receptions, sets up an atelier, studies with an artist called Laidpore, sells a few sketches and takes a small house around the corner, which the maid calls the pigeon house. Léonce consults a doctor about her, then leaves for New York and lets a newspaper notice explain the rearranged household. Alcée Arobin, a man with a reputation, becomes a daily visitor. At a farewell dinner Edna turns twenty-nine, shatters a glass when Victor Lebrun sings a song she associates with Robert, and afterwards lets Arobin walk her home through the empty streets. The move is not a rebellion in the grand manner: she keeps the servants, takes the furniture she likes and lets her husband pay the bills, which is both the joke and the limit of it. By the end of the winter the white house on Esplanade Street is being remodelled for a family that will not live in it.
Robert comes back from Mexico believing that Edna is still another man’s wife and therefore untouchable; she tells him that she is no longer one of Mr. Pontellier’s possessions, that she gives herself where she chooses. Adèle’s confinement interrupts them; her cry to think of the children follows Edna home, with Doctor Mandelet walking beside her. Robert leaves a note: I love you. Good-by—because I love you. Edna returns alone to Grand Isle, walks into the sea, and the novel ends with the old terror flaring up and sinking again. The last chapter returns to the beach where the book began, with a bird on a broken wing circling down to the water, and nothing in the prose says whether this is defeat or escape. The complete text here is the Project Gutenberg transcription of the 1899 book, and this edition also prints eight of Chopin’s stories.
Read beside its contemporaries, the novel looks less like a scandal and more like a diagnosis. If Edna’s New Orleans feels closed, the Chicago of Sister Carrie is merely a bigger room with the same locks, and the governess in The Turn of the Screw is another woman alone with a story no one will believe. Chopin’s contribution is the plainness: no trial, no rescue, no lesson, only a woman taking the measure of what she is allowed and finding it short. That is why the book still gets taught, and why it still makes readers angry. The three books share a question: what is a woman to do with a life that has been arranged for her, and what does it cost to answer honestly? None of them offers a way out, which is why they are still read. Chopin wrote no manifesto, and the novel makes no case; it simply shows the bill.
Historical Context
New Orleans in the 1890s was a city of French and Spanish inheritance, Creole families, quadroon balls in memory and a strict grammar of respectability. Grand Isle, reached by boat across Barataria Bay, was a summer resort for middle-class New Orleans households: cottages, a hotel, a bath-house, mosquitoes, and a beach where the Gulf is shallow for a long way out. Chopin’s novel is precise about that world’s manners, and its plot turns on the fact that a Creole husband is never jealous and a wife’s reputation is guarded by everyone else. The pension at Grand Isle belongs to Madame Lebrun, whose sons Robert and Victor are the novel’s two versions of Creole charm, one sentimental and one reckless. Chopin had lived in that society and does not explain its rules; the plot is the explanation.
Kate Chopin was born in St. Louis in 1850 to a French-speaking mother and an Irish father. She married Oscar Chopin in 1870, lived in New Orleans and then on a plantation in Cloutierville, Louisiana, bore six children, and was widowed in 1882. She returned to St. Louis, began writing fiction in 1889, and published two collections, Bayou Folk (1894) and A Night in Acadie (1897), whose Louisiana stories made her a name in the local-colour market. The Awakening was her second novel and the last book she published. Her mother’s family, the Farviers, were among the French-speaking St. Louis families whose stories she later used. At Fault, her first novel, had appeared in 1890 to little notice.
The reception in 1899 was bad in a specific way: reviewers found the book morbid, sordid and unwholesome, and a St. Louis library withdrew it from circulation. Chopin wrote almost no fiction afterwards and died in 1904. The recovery came in the 1960s and 1970s, when critics read the novel against the history of American women’s lives and Per Seyersted’s biography and edition of her complete works made the case for her. It is now a set text, read as a novel of awakening rather than a case study, and Chopin herself never joined a movement or wrote a manifesto. The 1899 notices were not unanimous, and some were respectful; what damaged the book was the sense that its heroine was not sufficiently sorry.
Key Characters & Literary Archetypes
- Edna Pontellier: Twenty-eight, married to a New Orleans broker, mother of two boys, and not a mother-woman. She learns to swim at Grand Isle, paints, sells a few sketches, takes a small house of her own and says near the end that she gives herself where she chooses. Her wanting is precise and her courage is not, which is what makes the last page unbearable. She is twenty-eight for most of the book and twenty-nine at her own dinner, and the difference matters to her.
- Léonce Pontellier: A broker of forty with an eye-glass and a Sunday paper, kind in the way of a man who owns things. He looks at his wife as one looks at a valuable piece of personal property which has suffered some damage. He is not a brute; he is a man who cannot imagine that the arrangement itself might be the problem. He is generous with money, exact about appearances, and genuinely puzzled by a wife who no longer wants to be managed.
- Robert Lebrun: A young Creole clerk who devotes each summer to a married woman and each autumn to the idea of Mexico. He teaches Edna to swim, proposes pirate gold and a pirogue by moonlight, and leaves for Vera Cruz the night she begins to understand herself. His goodbye note is four words longer than his courage. He is not a villain, only a young man with a small salary, a mother to support and a romantic idea of Mexico that serves him better than any plan.
- Adèle Ratignolle: The embodiment of every womanly grace and charm, married, sewing night-drawers, a baby every two years. She warns Robert to let Mrs. Pontellier alone because Edna is not one of us, and she is right. Her cry in childbirth, to think of the children, is the hardest sentence in the book. She is kind, unhurried and entirely without curiosity about what Edna wants, which is what makes her kindness frightening; she has three children already and a fourth coming.
- Mademoiselle Reisz: A small, disagreeable pianist in rusty black lace with artificial violets, who plays Chopin until Edna cries and tells her that she is the only one worth playing for. She reads Robert’s letters aloud, mends her gaiters, and says that the artist must possess the courageous soul that dares and defies. She lives on the top floor with a piano and no patience, and she is the only person in the novel who tells Edna the truth without softening it.
- Alcée Arobin: A man about town with a scar on his wrist from a duel outside Paris and no intention of marrying. He is patient, well mannered and a little insolent, and he is the test of what Edna wants rather than a rival for it. The novel is honest about what his attentions cost her, and about what they do not give. He is the kind of man a Creole husband is never jealous of, and the novel is careful to show that his charm is a technique rather than a feeling.
Core Literary Themes
- The sea and the first swim: The Gulf is the novel’s other voice: seductive, never ceasing, inviting the soul to wander in abysses of solitude. Edna’s first unassisted swim is the moment her body becomes hers, and the last swim is the same water read backwards. Between them the sea keeps offering a freedom with no furniture in it, and Chopin never says whether that is a promise or a warning. The line about swimming far out, where no woman had swum before, is less a triumph than a warning: the water is where she is most herself and least safe, and Chopin returns to it three times.
- Marriage as property: Léonce’s kindness is ownership in a good temper, and the ring on Edna’s finger is a claim she stamps on and then puts back on. Her small income from her mother’s estate matters more than any argument, because it lets her leave without asking. The novel’s most radical sentence is not about love but about possession: I am no longer one of Mr. Pontellier’s possessions to dispose of or not. The dinner in the pigeon house, paid for with her husband’s money, is the novel’s clearest statement that freedom and dependence can share a house, and Edna’s honesty about it makes her unsympathetic and credible at once.
- The mother-woman: Adèle is the standard against which Edna is measured and found wanting, and the novel refuses to make her a villain. What Edna cannot accept is not her children but the assumption that they possess her, body and soul; she is fond of them in an uneven, impulsive way, and the book will not pretend that this is devotion. Adèle’s warning at the end is both a kindness and a verdict. Edna’s children are not neglected in the Victorian sense; they are fed, dressed and sent to Iberville, and the novel never asks us to pity them. The question is whether being a good mother requires ceasing to be a person, and Chopin leaves the answer standing.
- Art, money and a room: Painting gives Edna a language and a little money; the pigeon house gives her an address. Chopin is exact about the cost of both: her teacher Laidpore is pleased with her work and a dealer sells a sketch or two, a winter at the races pays for a few months, and the house and the money that provides for it are still her husband’s. Freedom in this novel is itemised down to the rent, and the itemisation is the point. Painting is also the only activity in the book that makes her happy with no one else in the room, and the dealer who buys her work is a small triumph that the rent quietly corrects.
- Solitude and the courage to defy: Mademoiselle Reisz’s bird that would soar above the level plain of tradition and prejudice must have strong wings names the risk the novel has been measuring. Edna’s solitude deepens as her freedom grows, and no one in the book can follow her out: not Robert, not Arobin, not the doctor who guesses and says nothing. The courage to defy is real, and it is not the same thing as a place to go. Robert’s return is the test: he loves the woman he remembers, and the woman in front of him frightens him. Mademoiselle Reisz, who has chosen solitude on purpose, is the only model the novel offers, and she is not happy either.
Why Download Our Custom E-Reader Edition of The Awakening?
The text is the complete Project Gutenberg transcription of the 1899 book, the whole novel and all eight stories, set for e-readers rather than reproduced as a page scan. Nothing is abridged, modernised or rewritten, and the chapter divisions follow the original thirty-nine. The chapter numbering is the novel’s own, I to XXXIX, and the stories keep their titles. The story texts are set from the same transcription, not retyped.
It is built for reading on a phone or a reader: working chapter breaks, a table of contents that jumps, and paragraphs left with room to breathe. The EPUB, AZW3 and KEPUB files carry the same text, and the whole edition is under half a megabyte, small enough for an old device. Nothing is locked and nothing expires; the files open in any reader that takes an EPUB.
If you are reading for a class, this page gives you ten movement summaries, six character notes, five themes and the 1899 context before you download. If you are reading for pleasure, skip the guide and start with the parrot; the first chapter is short and the novel never slows down. The guide is written for this edition and does not replace the text; it is there to be ignored if you prefer.
- Project Gutenberg transcription, via Project Gutenberg #160 — the source text used for this edition, checked against the 1899 chapter divisions and the story order, with no page images and no OCR noise.
- Complete edition all thirty-nine chapters of the novel and the eight short stories in one file, in the order the 1899 book prints them, novel first and stories after.
- EPUB, AZW3 and KEPUB Apple Books and Kobo take the EPUB or KEPUB, Kindles take the AZW3, and all three carry the same text and the same chapter breaks.
- Summary and analysis ten movement summaries, six characters, five themes and the context on this page, written for this edition and kept short enough to read before the first chapter.
- Sister Carrie — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
- The Turn of the Screw — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
- The Yellow Wallpaper — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
Chapter summaries
The novel has thirty-nine untitled chapters, so these ten summaries follow it in movements of three or four chapters; the last two entries cover the eight stories printed with it.
- Chapters I–IV: The parrot, the beach and the ring: Grand Isle, August. A green and yellow parrot repeats Allez vous-en! while Léonce Pontellier reads a day-old newspaper and looks at his wife as one looks at a valuable piece of personal property. Adèle Ratignolle sews and talks of her babies; Edna remembers a Kentucky childhood, a cavalry officer and a tragedian’s photograph, and says her marriage was an accident. The chapter ends with Edna crying on the gallery, her husband asleep, and the parrot still talking to nobody. The house is full of small negotiations about money, and none of them is about anything else.
- Chapters V–VIII: The Creole summer: Robert Lebrun attaches himself to Edna for the season, and Adèle warns him to let Mrs. Pontellier alone because she is not one of us and might mistake his attentions for something serious. Upstairs at the Lebrun cottage Madame Lebrun sews at a treadle machine and talks of Victor’s temper and of Montel, who will be in Vera Cruz next month. Robert begins to think of following him there. Nothing happens in these chapters except talk, and the talk is enough to change the weather. Adèle’s warning is the first time someone says out loud what Robert is doing.
- Chapters IX–XII: The swim and the Chênière: At a Saturday musical evening Mademoiselle Reisz plays Chopin and tells Edna that she is the only one worth playing for. Edna swims out alone for the first time, feels the sea’s seduction, and sits with Robert in the hammock until her husband comes up from the hotel. She refuses to go inside. Two days later she and Robert cross to the Chênière Caminada and plan a trip to Grande Terre. The chapter that follows the swim is the shortest in the book and the most dangerous.
- Chapters XIII–XVI: Madame Antoine and Mexico: Edna faints in the little church and sleeps at Madame Antoine’s, waking to broiled fowl and stories of Baratarian pirates and buried gold. Back at Grand Isle, Robert announces at dinner that he leaves for Mexico that night. Edna cries, refuses to see him off and recognises the symptoms of infatuation. Mademoiselle Reisz asks whether she misses her friend greatly, and reads her the letters he sends his mother. The crossing is not shown, only the letters that fail to arrive at the right address. Robert leaves at ten, and Edna will not go down to the wharf.
- Chapters XVII–XX: The house on Esplanade Street: In New Orleans the Pontelliers keep a dazzling white house and a Tuesday reception that Edna has kept for six years. One Tuesday she stays out, and that night she stamps on her wedding ring and smashes a vase. She begins to paint in an atelier, drops the receptions, and goes looking for Mademoiselle Reisz through the old directory, a grocer on Bienville Street and Madame Lebrun’s house with bars on the windows. The soup is impossible, the calling cards are read aloud, and the evening ends with broken glass on the carpet.
- Chapters XXI–XXIV: The letter and the Colonel: Mademoiselle Reisz reads Edna a letter from Robert that is about her from beginning to end, and plays the Impromptu until Edna sobs. Léonce consults Doctor Mandelet, who advises him to let his wife alone. Edna’s father arrives for a wedding; she sketches him, and he drinks toddies. She refuses to attend her sister’s wedding, and when the house empties she dines alone, reads Emerson and feels a restfulness she has not known. The Colonel’s advice is authority and coercion, and the narrator notes what it did to his own wife.
- Chapters XXV–XXVIII: Arobin: On rainy days Edna goes to the races with Alcée Arobin and Mrs. Highcamp, wins money and hears the story of the saber cut on Arobin’s wrist. He kisses her hand, then apologises in an elaborate note, then becomes a daily visitor. At Mademoiselle Reisz’s she admits that she is in love with Robert. Arobin kisses her, and she finds that it is the first kiss of her life to which her nature has really responded. The kiss happens in the middle of an ordinary evening, and the novel treats it as a fact rather than a catastrophe.
- Chapters XXIX–XXXII: The pigeon house: Edna moves into a small four-room house around the corner without waiting for her husband’s answer, and gives a farewell dinner for ten. She turns twenty-nine, Victor sings Ah! si tu savais, and she shatters her glass on the table. Arobin walks her home and stays. Léonce writes his disapproval, orders the house remodelled and lets the newspapers report a summer abroad; Edna spends a week at Iberville with her children. The dinner is the last time the old house is used for the old purpose. Léonce’s letter calls the move unwise; Celestine carries the flowers to the new address.
- Chapters XXXIII–XXXVI: Robert returns: Adèle warns Edna about Arobin’s reputation and makes her promise to send for her at her hour of trial. Robert reappears at Mademoiselle Reisz’s flat, comes to dinner at the pigeon house, sees Arobin’s photograph and leaves. Weeks pass. In Catiche’s suburban garden Robert finally tells her what he has been fighting since last summer, and she answers that she is no longer one of Mr. Pontellier’s possessions to dispose of or not. The meeting in the garden ends with a knock at the door and Adèle’s servant asking for her.
- Chapters XXXVII–XXXIX: The last swim: Adèle’s labour takes Edna into a room of torture and a cry to think of the children. Doctor Mandelet walks her home and hears that she wants to be let alone. Robert’s note waits in the lamplight: I love you. Good-by — because I love you. Soon after, Edna takes Beaudelet’s lugger to Grand Isle, asks for towels, and walks into the cold water. The last pages are the shortest in the novel and the quietest. The parrot and the mocking-bird are gone; there is only the Gulf and the house Victor is patching.
- The short stories: bayou and ruin: Beyond the Bayou: La Folle, who has not crossed the water since childhood, carries a wounded boy to the doctor and then crosses alone at sunrise. Ma’ame Pélagie: two sisters hoard money for thirty years to rebuild a ruined mansion, and one of them gives the dream up for a niece. Désirée’s Baby: a young father discovers the colour of his own child. A Respectable Woman: Mrs. Baroda is drawn to a guest and then invites him back. Each story is short enough to read in a sitting and none of them ends with a lesson.
- The short stories: kisses and ledgers: The Kiss: Nathalie keeps a rich plain suitor and a handsome one, and learns what each is worth. A Pair of Silk Stockings: Mrs. Sommers finds fifteen dollars and spends an afternoon on herself. The Locket: a soldier’s keepsake comes home without him, until it does not. A Reflection: four paragraphs on standing by the roadside while the procession of human energy goes past. The voices are all Creole, and the last piece is not a story at all but a lyric essay.
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