Designed to appeal to the booklover, the Macmillan Collector's Library is a series of beautiful gift editions of much loved classic titles. Macmillan Collector's Library are books to love and treasure. Readers and critics were scandalized by The Awakening when it was first published but it is now regarded as amongst the boldest and earliest of feminist fiction. It is published here with a selection of Chopin's strikingly perceptive short stories and introduced by Dr J. Michelle Coghlan, specialist in American literature. In The Awakening Edna Pontellier is on holiday with her husband and two young children at a sleepy resort town on the Louisiana Gulf Coast. There, she is pursued by the charming and unmarried Robert Lebrun. Edna doesn't play by the rules, flirtation turns to an affair which awakens in Edna her own desire to break away from her passionless marriage, her children and the strict conventions of nineteenth-century society.