Books like The Awakening and Selected Short Stories

I can’t help it. I’m a sucker for tragic love and a gloomy ending. For social and moral constraints pushing down until one suffocates. I’ve lived it. I caught my breath and clutched this book and had a completely personal reaction to the beauty and the agony. Some of the one star reviews puzzle me, not because people disliked the book, which would be perfectly reasonable, but because some people suggest Edna could’ve just gotten a divorce and solved her problem that way. That she was a selfish “trollop” to have an affair and leave her kids. This simplistic and unrealistic response to a book written in 1899 floors me. To rate a book low because a female abandoned her children is laughable…especially when you consider that had the protagonist been male and abandoned his kids in the same way this outrage would not exist. I guess this is what Chopin was getting at. 113 years ago.