Edna Pontellier is married, twenty-eight, and at the cross road of her life. She is passionate and artistic, but has no one who understands her deep yearnings. She jumps at the chance to spend a summer away from her husband and the heat of New Orleans at a small costal retreat.Here she is enveloped in a small circle of friends where she can begin to throw off the strictures and moires of the 1890s bourgeoisie. Stepwise Edna renounces her obligations, takes a lover, and is propelled in a course that frees, consumes, and eventually destroys her.
In what was to be her last novel, Kate Chopin shocked the readers of her day, by showing a woman fulfilled by throwing off the ties of marriage and children.