In assessing the “first hundred years” of The Awakening's critical reception, Bernard Koloski concludes that Kate Chopin's work seems destined to be the subject of lively critical inquiry for at least another century. Given the quality and freshness of the approaches in this volume, that assessment has the ring of truth. As Koloski observes, though not everyone has been pleased with the prominence Kate Chopin's novel has attained in American studies since its remarkable recovery in the 1970s, The Awakening, along with the rest of Chopin's fiction, has real staying power – yielding novel insights not only about human experience (as with all good fiction), but also about genre, literary periods, intellectual history, material culture, and the limits of language.

This is a rich and comprehensive volume. The ten essays include helpful overviews, like those of veteran Chopin scholars Bernard Koloski and Emily Toth and Janet Beer's lively prologue. While these essays track mostly familiar territory, they also provide nuanced critical introductions to the many new readers who continue to be charmed by Chopin's fictions. But these essays also open new terrain in Chopin studies. Texts and tropes identified by earlier critics are reexamined, suggesting how much more we can learn from them, as in Donna Campbell's repositioning of At Fault as a social-problem novel, Pamela Knight's broad inquiry into Chopin's treatment of children, or Susan Castillo's thoughtful inquiry into the complexities of race. And while The Awakening is central to many of these analyses, it is heartening to find Chopin's “other novel” and so much of her superb short fiction given the critical attention they clearly merit.

Throughout the volume, there are vivid illustrations of Chopin's profound engagement with the critical ideas of her time – that long post-Civil War moment of transition between many familiar social and intellectual structures and the different realities that were taking shape in the decades before the First World War. Ann Heilmann, for example, pursues Chopin's relationship with the late nineteenth-century “Anglo-American fiction of the New Woman,” a construct that informs Chopin's feminist perspectives, perspectives which have defined much of her twentieth-century appeal. Michael Worton then inventively reaffirms those feminist views through the lens of twentieth-century French feminist theory, suggesting that the “quests for enduring relationships” – “relationality” – are as significant as independence in Chopin's work. Other essays likewise use contemporary critical lenses to indicate how Chopin both reflects her own time and speaks to ours. Helen Taylor examines how Chopin's stories reflect the postcolonial environment of Louisiana, while Elizabeth Nolan and Avril Horner, respectively, consider how Chopin's fiction pushes the generic boundaries of the novel and of literary modernism.

These latter essays perhaps suggest the most satisfying qualities of this volume overall, even as they identify a key to the continuing critical interest in this once-neglected and undervalued writer. In one way or another, all of the scholars in this collection are trying to explain the disquieting paradox of Chopin's failure to convey to her contemporaries a view of female selfhood and sexuality that, a century later, seems so profoundly perceptive, even indisputable. But as Nolan, Horner, and others demonstrate, what remains most intriguing about Chopin is her subtle artistry, an artistry that unsettles notions of literary form and periodization no less than the insights of her stories challenged contemporary views of womanhood and sexual experience. That combination – good stories, literary craft, and social consciousness – ought to guarantee Kate Chopin at least another century or two of readers and critics. And Janet Beer's fine collection of essays indicates just how interesting the reading will continue to be.