This book provides what its editor, Bernard Koloski, calls a “collective recollection” building “a literary foundation narrative” – in this case a narrative which gives new voice to the early scholars who not only brought Kate Chopin's work back into larger circulation but also wrote the provocative and inspiring commentary that energized a coming generation of Chopin scholars. The story of Kate Chopin scholarship is also the story of feminist criticism and Koloski is unequivocal when he asserts that “feminism unquestionably provided the primary motive force for the … revival.” This collection of essays has, by its nature, an extremely personal dimension, but it is also made clear throughout that the exploration of Chopin's work conducted by the foundational scholars parallels and presages larger developments in literary and cultural studies. Emily Toth uses the framework provided by the development of her career as a critic and biographer to illustrate the wider changes in the academy, and, in particular, its attitude to women writers and scholars. Barbara Ewell notes in her essay that the recovery of The Awakening “helped to bring about the repositioning of local color in literary history.” Helen Taylor, who brought Kate Chopin to the United Kingdom, charts the development of her own and others' understanding of “New Orleans writers within a transatlantic context,” Taylor being amongst the earliest to bring a truly transatlanticist dimension and perspective to the study of American literature and culture. Mary E. Papke similarly celebrates Chopin's “interculturalism,” and revisits her dedication and debt to Maupassant and other French writers as a way of indicating the writer's “insistence on the necessity of right reading” as crucial to the telling of “the right stories.” Thomas Bonner Jr. links his discovery of Kate Chopin with the reverberations in his own life following Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, remembering a post-desegregation bus ride to school spent reading “Désirée's Baby”; Susan Lohafer critiques Chopin anew in order to chart her own work in “developing a genre-specific vocabulary for talking about short stories”; and Anna Shannon Elfenbein positions the restoration of “women of color” in relation to her own writing about Chopin, as she asserts that such “representations are evidence of Chopin's genius as a literary realist.” Bernard Koloski concludes the collection with a lyrical testament to the pull and the push of the contrary in Chopin's writing: “the undertow in her work … that makes her so complex, so deliciously ambiguous, so wonderfully resonant today.” This is a collection written by enthusiasts for enthusiasts, present and future; it is a collection which tells of conversions to the cause of Chopin, by supervisors, sceptical colleagues, cynical students – all, indeed, willing to be seduced by her except one Diana Trilling, who wrote, in response to a request that she contribute to a volume of feminist criticism, that she could not because the editors had specified “no deadline, and, most important, no fee.”