A portrayal of a woman trapped in a stifling marriage, who seeks and finds passionate physical love outside the straitened confines of her domestic situation. Highlights the treatment of marital infidelity and an illicit relationship.

"Kate Chopin, according to her contemporaries, was a "woman of mysterious fascination"--And Kate Chopin's Private Papers reveals many of the author's secrets. Chopin (1850-1904), author of about a hundred short stories and two novels (The Awakening and At Fault), also kept diaries, wrote letters and poems, translated short stories and articles from the French, and worried about her career. Chopin's newly discovered manuscripts, published for the first...

In the summer of her 28th year, Edna Pontellier and her children, along with the wives and families of other prospective businessmen, spend the summer in an idyllic coastal community away from their husbands and the sweltering heat of 1890s' New Orleans. Aware of deep yearnings that are unfulfilled by marriage and motherhood, Edna plunges into an illicit liaison that reawakens her long dormant desires, inflames her heart, and eventually blinds her...