The Awakening by Kate Chopin

Backlisted

Backlisted Podcast

Arts, Books, Leisure, Hobbies

4.7 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 13 December 2022

⏱️ 67 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Awakening is an American classic, first published in 1899. The novel’s focus is the inner life of Edna Pontellier, a 29 year-old a married woman and mother of two boys, whose husband Léonce is a New Orleans businessman of Louisiana Creole heritage. The book’s notoriety derives from Edna’s refusal to accept the role that American society of the late 19th century has allocated to her. After the controversy that greeted it on publication, The Awakening sank from view until it was rediscovered by a new generation of readers after the Louisiana State University Press published Chopin’s collected works in 1969. Now acclaimed as a feminist classic – it was published in the UK in 1978 by The Women’s Press and is now both a Penguin and an Oxford classic, a Canongate Canon, and one of the most popular university set texts in America. We’re joined by the Irish American writer Timothy O’Grady and publisher Rachael Kerr to find out why. This episode also finds Andy revelling in Beware of the Bull, a new biography of the incomparable Yorkshire singer-songwriter Jake Thackray (Scratching Shed), while John enjoys Louise Willder’s Blurb Your Enthusiasm, the product of her twenty-five years as a copywriter at Penguin. Timings may vary as a result of adverts: 04:57 Blurb Your Enthusiasm by Louise Willder 11:00 Beware of the Bull: The Enigmatic Genius of Jake Thackray by Paul Thompson and John Watterson 18:59 The Awakening by Kate Chopin * To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops. * For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm * If you'd like to support the show, receive the show early and get extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books.
0:29.8	Today you find us gazing out on the Gulf of Mexico, somewhere below New Orleans in the late 1890s.
0:36.8	It's an early evening and the sea, whispers, clamors and murmurs as the sun sinks.
0:43.8	A tall slender woman in a faded bathing suit is walking slowly towards the waves to remove the suit.
0:49.8	Stands for a moment in the breeze and the fading sunshine and then walks calmly into the season brace.
0:56.8	I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound, the platform where readers crowd from books they really want to read.
1:02.8	And I'm Andy Miller, author of Year of Reading Dangerously.
1:05.8	And today we join by two guests, one returning and one making their backlisted debut.
1:11.8	Tim O'Grady, Rachel Kerr, hello to you both.
1:14.8	Hello.
1:15.8	Hello.
1:16.8	Our new guest is the writer Timothy O'Grady, Tim was born in Chicago and when he was 22, he migrated to an island off the North West coast of Ireland.
1:23.8	Since then, he's lived in Dublin, London, Valencia, Spain and Turun, Poland, the city of Copernicus.
1:30.8	I just knew that.
1:31.8	I just, I just threw that in.
1:35.8	He's the author of seven books.
1:37.8	His novels are Motherland.
1:39.8	I could read the sky.
1:40.8	A collaboration with the photographer Steve Pike and light.
1:43.8	His nonfiction books, Accurious Journey and Oral History of the Irish Revolution of 1916 to 23.
1:49.8	On Golf and Divine Magnetic Lands, an account of a return journey to the United States after 30 years of living in Europe.
1:57.8	His book, Children of Las Vegas, based on interviews with people who grew up in the city was published by.
	...

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