Kate Chopin
Kate Chopin (1850-1904) is known for her depictions of culture in New Orleans, Louisiana, and of women's struggles for freedom. Chopin was born Katherine O'Flaherty in St. Louis, Missouri to Thomas and Eliza O'Flaherty. Thomas opened a boat store, a wholesale grocery, and a commission house and was a member of St. Louis' upper class. Eliza Faris O'Flaherty was very attractive, intelligent, and likeable. Of French Creole ancestry, she married into the Irish family of Thomas O'Flaherty at age 15. However, she died suddenly in June, 1885.
In 1870, when Kate was 18 years old, she married Oscar Chopin who was then 25 years old and a Creole cotton trader. She moved with him to New Orleans. After a business failure, the family moved to a plantation near Cloutierville, Louisiana, where Oscar Chopin contracted malaria and died in 1883. Kate managed the plantation for a year before returning to St. Louis with her six children in 1884.
After Chopin's mother died in 1885, she became depressed and her obstetrician encouraged her to write as a form of therapy and source of income. So, she founded and maintained a literary salon and began her writing career.
For more than a decade following her first published story in 1889, Chopin depicted the manners, customs, speech, and surroundings of Louisiana's Creole and Cajun residents. Two collections of her short fiction were published in the 1890s: Bayou Folk (1894) and A Night in Acadie (1897). Chopin also produced a substantial body of poetry, reviews, and criticism.
As her later stories, such as "The Story of an Hour," began to emphasize women's need for independence and capacity for passion, editors became less receptive to her work. Chopin published a novel, At Fault, in 1890 at her own expense. Several publishers rejected her second novel, and she destroyed the manuscript.
The Awakening (1899), the novel now considered her masterpiece, attracted a storm of negative criticism for its lyrical depiction of a woman's developing independence and sensuality. Subsequently, her editors suspended publication of her third collection of stories, A Vocation and a Voice. The collection was not published until 1991. As a result of the negative criticism and social ostracism that followed The Awakening, Chopin produced few additional writings, and over the next half-century her work became obscure.
Current Book List
2000 Book List