Kate Chopin (1851–1904,) née Katherine O’Flaherty, was an American novelist and short-story writer known as an interpreter of New Orleans culture. She is now considered a forerunner of American 20th-century feminist authors of Southern or Catholic background.
Born in St Louis, Missouri, Chopin was the daughter of an Irish immigrant and a French-Creole mother. She was well educated at the Sacred Heart convent, made her début in society, and married Oscar Chopin, a Creole cotton trader from Louisiana. It was a happy marriage, scarred only by business failure.
After her husband died of swamp fever (1882,) Chopin returned with their six children to St Louis, where she began to compose sketches of her life in ‘Old Natchitoches,’ such as Bayou Folk (1894) and A Night in Acadie (1897.) She wrote more than 100 short stories, including “Désirée’s Baby” and “Madame Celestin’s Divorce,” which are extensively anthologized.
Chopin’s most famous work is The Awakening (1899,) a realistic novel about the sexual, emotional, and artistic rebirth of a young wife and mother who leaves her family and ultimately commits suicide. This work was harshly condemned because of its sexual frankness and its portrayal of interracial marriage. The Awakening went out of print for more than 50 years. When it was rediscovered in the 1950s, critics marveled at its prose’s beauty and its modern sensibility.
Following the storm, she wrote only a few poems and short stories. American writer and literary critic Edmund Wilson revived interest in her work, and feminists have since embraced her as a fin de siècle iconoclast bravely articulating the plight of the ‘lost’ woman. Her concerns about the freedom of women presaged later feminist literary themes.
University of Oslo’s Per Seyersted wrote Kate Chopin, a Critical Biography (1969.) Seyersted also edited The Complete Works of Kate Chopin (1969.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Kate Chopin
I trust it will not be giving away professional secrets to say that many readers would be surprised, perhaps shocked, at the questions which some newspaper editors will put to a defenseless woman under the guise of flattery.
—Kate Chopin
Topics: Authors & Writing
But the beginning of things, of a world especially, is necessarily vague, tangled, chaotic, and exceedingly disturbing.
—Kate Chopin
Topics: Beginnings
She missed him the days when some pretext served to take him away from her, just as one misses the sun on a cloudy day without having thought much about the sun when it was shining.
—Kate Chopin
Topics: Love
The bird that would soar above the plain of tradition and prejudice must have strong wings.
—Kate Chopin
Topics: Prejudice, Tradition
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