The Awakening (1899) is a short but intensely rich novel, as dense and brilliant as the French Impressionist paintings which were put on exhibition for the first time a few decades before its publication. Like those painthags, the novel scandalized its contemporary audiences. Within a few years, however, the book was all but for gotten. Fortunately, it was rescued from oblivion seventy years later and has emerged triumphantly as one of the most celebrated portraits of a lady in American literature.