Toward Her Awakening - by Kathleen Williams Renk (Paperback)

About the Book

Kathleen Williams Renk re-imagines the life of novelist Kate Chopin.

Book Synopsis

Kathleen Williams Renk re-imagines the life of novelist Kate Chopin.

In 1850s' St. Louis, five-year-old Katy O'Flaherty's father sends her to a strict convent school to stifle her precocious nature. Thus begins the life of the girl who becomes a progressive, feminist, "new woman" writer who shocks the world with her novel The Awakening, which Willa Cather derided as the "Creole Bovary."

Kate O'Flaherty Chopin spent her childhood in St. Louis during the Civil War where she witnessed enslaved people sold on the courthouse steps. Raised by courageous women, including a French great-grandmother who ran trading boats on the Mississippi and who believed in justice for all, it's no surprise that Kate grew into a woman who rode bareback, smoked cigarettes, dressed audaciously, and wrote about taboo topics. In other words, she defied every expectation for women in the middle-late Victorian period.

Experience the vibrant and colorful world along the Mississippi and the unique Louisiana 1800s' culture that permeates Chopin's writings and her approach to life.

Review Quotes

"In Towards Her Awakening, Kathleen Renk combines literary scholarship and her novelist's imagination in a rich and searching portrait of the essential American author, Kate Chopin . . . an artistic awakening, a portrait of a woman whose voice gradually emerges through courage, contradiction, and the stubborn need to tell her own truth." - Carol Roh Spaulding, Award-winning author of Waiting For Mr. Kim

"Kathleen Renk paints a vivid portrait of the fiery and independent-minded Kate Chopin as she fights to claim her voice as an author and independent woman against the strictures placed on women in the late 19th century. This is a beautiful tribute to a talented, persistent and brave woman who forged her own way against great odds in life and literature." - Chris Chandler, Stay Sweet: Tales of Quirky Southern Love

"Tuck into Kathleen Renk's Toward Her Awakening, an absolute delight. Her prose, transportive. Her understanding of human emotion, complications, and limits is a master course in writerly wisdom." - Christina Marrocco, award-winning author of Addio, Love Monster and When Beauty Comes Apart