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The Awakening and Selected Short Stories — cover
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Aeneas Press edition Victorian First published 1899

The Awakening and Selected Short Stories

by Kate Chopin 1850–1904

The book, and the century it came out of.

A young wife summers on Grand Isle, learns to swim, and begins to want a life that Louisiana in 1899 has no room for. Chopin was widowed at thirty-two with six children and wrote to feed them; reviewers called this book morbid and vulgar, it was quietly dropped from the shelves, and she published almost nothing more. It waited fifty years to be read properly. Illustrated with 60 full-page plates — paintings by Chase, Gonzalès and Hunt among them.

A green and yellow parrot, which hung in a cage outside the door, kept repeating over and…
The first sentence of The Awakening and Selected Short Stories
A note on this edition

The Awakening and Selected Short Stories, by Kate Chopin, complete and unabridged. Spelling and punctuation follow present-day American usage; the sentences, the paragraphs and the voice are the author’s, word for word.

It was written in another era and may carry attitudes a reader today will find dated. They are kept for the sake of the work and do not reflect the views of this house.

The edition
Format
Ebook
Extent
about 200 pages
Reading time
about 4 hours
Illustrations
Full-page plates, credited
Text
Complete, unabridged
Language
en
This edition
2026
ISBN
9785486017001
The plates

60 paintings are bound into this edition

Six of them are shown here, taken from the volume itself. Each is reproduced full page and named with its painter and year.

At the Seaside, William Merritt Chase
At the Seaside William Merritt Chase 1890
Landscape near the Sea, Thomas Couture
Landscape near the Sea Thomas Couture 1876
The Café-Concert, Édouard Manet
The Café-Concert Édouard Manet 1878
Twilight, George Loring Brown
Twilight George Loring Brown 1877
Bellows Falls, Alvan Fisher
Bellows Falls Alvan Fisher 1863
Long Island Farmhouses, William Sidney Mount
Long Island Farmhouses William Sidney Mount 1862
The setting

A page from this edition

Not a mock-up: this page is taken from the finished volume. The ornament above the chapter belongs to its shelf and to no other, the opening letter is set as a drop capital, and the plate below carries the name of the painter and the year.

A page of The Awakening and Selected Short Stories as set for this edition
The opening of a chapter
A page of The Awakening and Selected Short Stories as set for this edition
A page where a plate falls

Both photographed from the finished volume.

Colophon

The Awakening and Selected Short Stories, first published 1899, issued in this edition by Aeneas Press in 2026 on the Literary Classics shelf. Newly set, with the ornament of its series above each chapter and a drop capital on the opening page. Illustrated with full-page plates, each named with its painter.

Published as an ebook and not issued in print by this house; it carries one ISBN, 9785486017001, and is supplied worldwide. This edition — its setting, its ornament, its cover art, and the selection and attribution of its plates — © 2026 Aeneas Press.

Before you buy

Questions readers ask

Is this the whole of The Awakening and Selected Short Stories?
Yes — complete and unabridged. Nothing is cut, condensed or paraphrased. This is the book, not a summary of it.
What exactly did you change?
The spelling and the punctuation follow present-day American usage. Kate Chopin's sentences are untouched — same words, same order, same rhythm.
Are the pictures really in the book?
Yes. The edition carries full-page plates bound into the text, each one named with its painter and the year it was made. Six of them are shown on this page.
How long is it?
About 200 pages, which is roughly about 4 hours of reading.
What do I actually get?
An illustrated ebook with its own ISBN, sold worldwide. One file, yours to keep, readable on any device.
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The Awakening and Selected Short Stories
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