Kate Chopin’s classic The Awakening can be interpreted through the lens of Chopin’s own intellectual and social development to show how the novel tells a story at once similar to and different from that of its author’s life. In this reading, the main character of the novel begins as a figure with almost no exposure to the realm culture and ideas, but develops a keen appetite for independent thinking and undergoes, in the course of the novel, an education – one that, at the end of the book, is perhaps only really beginning in earnest. Chopin’s own development is both mirror and foil to that of the novel’s heroine.