A young wife summers on Grand Isle, learns to swim, and begins to want a life that Louisiana in 1899 has no room for. Chopin was widowed at thirty-two with six children and wrote to feed them; reviewers called this book morbid and vulgar, it was quietly dropped from the shelves, and she published almost nothing more. It waited fifty years to be read properly. Fifty-eight plates by Childe Hassam, William Merritt Chase and others follow the sea and shore from 1869 to 1927, the same salt light that surrounds Edna's summer on Grand Isle.
