Kate Chopin

In the United States and abroad, Kate Chopin (b. 1850–d. 1904) is recognized as one of America’s essential 19th-century authors. Her fiction is widely taught in universities and secondary schools. It is explored in hundreds of scholarly books, essays, and dissertations—as well as in the popular media. It has been made into plays, films, songs, dances, graphic fiction, and an opera. And it has been translated into twenty-some languages. But it was not always so. Chopin was born Catherine O’Flaherty in St. Louis, Missouri, to a mother of French descent and a father born in Ireland. She grew up speaking both French and English and studied at a Roman Catholic academy with nuns schooled in French intellectual traditions. In 1870 she married Oscar Chopin, traveled to Europe on her honeymoon, and settled in New Orleans, Louisiana. She bore five sons and a daughter. In 1879, after her husband’s business failed, the family relocated to the Natchitoches area of northern Louisiana, but in 1882 Oscar died, and shortly after Chopin moved with her children back to St. Louis, where she interacted with a group of progressive philosophers, journalists, editors, educators, and others. She began writing fiction in the late 1880s, drawing on her intimate knowledge of the lives of Louisiana Creoles, Acadians, African Americans, Native Americans, and other groups. Her novel At Fault (1890) received little attention, but she had significant success with her short stories, placing nineteen of them in Vogue, twelve in Youth’s Companion, and others in the Atlantic Monthly, the Century, Harper’s Young People, and additional magazines. She published two collections of stories, Bayou Folk (1894) and A Night in Acadie (1897), both of which were praised by book reviewers. About a third of her hundred-some short stories were published in, submitted to, or intended for children’s or family magazines. By the late 1890s, Chopin’s fiction was popular among American readers. But her novel The Awakening (1899) was denounced by reviewers, who called it “unhealthy,” “sordid,” “vulgar,” and “poison”—in part because it dealt with extramarital sex—and Chopin’s work was mostly ignored for half a century, experiencing a remarkable revival beginning only in the 1960s, long after her death. Today, Kate Chopin’s novels and stories are celebrated for their graceful, sensitive treatment of women’s lives and are discussed by scholars exploring gender, race, literary genres, religion and an array of other subjects.