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ab Preface What does Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899) offer today’s students of history? One way to answer that question is through insights we gain from philosopher and historian of ideas Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997) in his book The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History (1953). Leo Tolstoy, Berlin writes, complains about people “who did not be- gin to understand what it is that life truly consists of.” They are people, he adds, who mistook [life’s] outer accidents, the unimportant aspects which lie outside the individual soul—the so-called social, economic, politi- cal realities—for that which alone is genuine, the individual experi- ence, the specific relation of individuals to one another, the colours, smells, tastes, sounds and movements, the jealousies, loves, hatreds, passions, the rare flashes of insight, the transforming moments, the ordinary day-to-day succession of private data which constitute all there is—which are reality. (Berlin 2013, 22) It is such a reality that The Awakening offers students of history. Leo Tol- stoy (1828–1910) and Kate Chopin (1850–1904) were contemporaries, living most of their lives in the 19th century—Tolstoy in Russia, Chopin in the United States. They both wrote novels, and although they probably did not read each other’s works, they shared a similar view of what a novel ought to be. It should be about what “life truly consists of,” as Berlin says, about “the specific relation of individuals to one another, . . . the ordinary day-to-day succession of private data which constitute all there is—which are reality.” The Awakening gives us just such a “day-to-day succession of private data”—the intimate thoughts and feelings of a woman as she inter- acts with her husband, her children, and her friends and acquaintances. Berlin exaggerates, of course. There can be no doubt that “social, eco- nomic, political realities” deeply affect people’s lives, whether people