Read the excerpt from Willa Cather’s review of The Awakening from The Pittsburgh Leader, July 8, 1899. An author’s choice of themes is frequently as inexplicable as his choice of a wife. It is governed by some innate temperamental bias that cannot be diagrammed. This is particularly so in women who write, and I shall not attempt to say why Miss Chopin has devoted so exquisite and sensitive, well-governed a style to so trite and sordid a theme. She writes much better than it is ever given to most people to write, and hers is a genuinely literary style. What is Willa Cather’s response to Chopin’s writing?