kate chopin biography

Biography of Kate Chopin, American Author and Protofeminist

Missouri Historical Society / public domain

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Kate Chopin (born Katherine O'Flaherty; February 8, 1850–August 22, 1904) was an American author whose short stories and novels explored pre- and post-war Southern life. Today, she is considered a pioneer of early feminist literature. She is best known for her novel The Awakening , a depiction of a woman's struggle for selfhood that was immensely controversial during Chopin's lifetime.

Fast Facts: Kate Chopin

• Known For : American author of novels and short stories
• Born : February 8, 1850 in St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.
• Parents: Thomas O'Flaherty and Eliza Faris O'Flaherty
• Died : August 22, 1904 in St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.
• Education : Sacred Heart Academy (from ages 5-18)
• Selected Works : "Désirée's Baby" (1893), "The Story of an Hour" (1894), "The Storm" (1898), The Awakening (1899)
• Spouse: Oscar Chopin (m. 1870, died 1882)
• Children: Jean Baptiste, Oscar Charles, George Francis, Frederick, Felix Andrew, Lélia
• Notable Quote : “To be an artist includes much; one must possess many gifts—absolute gifts—which have not been acquired by one’s own effort. And, moreover, to succeed, the artist much possess the courageous soul … the brave soul. The soul that dares and defies.”

Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Kate Chopin was the third of five children born to Thomas O’Flaherty, a successful businessman who had immigrated from Ireland, and his second wife Eliza Faris, a woman of Creole and French-Canadian descent. Kate had siblings and half-siblings (from her father’s first marriage), but she was the family's only surviving child; her sisters died in infancy and her half-brothers died as young adults.

Raised Roman Catholic, Kate attended Sacred Heart Academy, an institution run by nuns, from age five to her graduation at age eighteen. In 1855, her schooling was interrupted by the death of her father, who was killed in a railway accident when a bridge collapsed. Kate returned home for two years to live with her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, all of whom were widows. Kate was tutored by her great-grandmother, Victoria Verdon Charleville. Charleville was a significant figure in her own right: she was a businesswoman and the first woman in St. Louis to legally separate from her husband .

After two years, Kate was allowed to return to school, where she had the support of her best friend, Kitty Garesche, and her mentor, Mary O’Meara. However, after the Civil War , Garesche and her family were forced to leave St. Louis because they had supported the Confederacy ; this loss left Kate in a state of loneliness.

In June 1870, at age 20, Kate married Oscar Chopin, a cotton merchant five years her senior. The couple moved to New Orleans, a location that influenced much of her late writing. In eight years, between 1871 and 1879, the couple had six children: five sons (Jean Baptiste, Oscar Charles, George Francis, Frederick, and Felix Andrew) and one daughter, Lélia. Their marriage was, by all accounts, a happy one, and Oscar apparently admired his wife’s intelligence and capability.

Widowhood and Depression

By 1879, the family had moved to the rural community of Cloutierville, following the failure of Oscar Chopin’s cotton business . Oscar died of swamp fever three years later, leaving his wife with significant debts of over $42,000 (the equivalent of approximately $1 million today).

Left to support herself and their children, Chopin took over the business. She was rumored to flirt with local businessmen, and allegedly had an affair with a married farmer. Ultimately, she could not salvage the plantation or the general store, and in 1884, she sold the businesses and moved back to St. Louis with some financial help from her mother.

Soon after Chopin settled back in St. Louis, her mother died suddenly. Chopin fell into a depression. Her obstetrician and family friend, Dr. Frederick Kolbenheyer, was the one to suggest writing as a form of therapy, as well as a possible source of income. By 1889, Chopin had taken the suggestion and thus began her writing career.

Scribe of Short Stories (1890-1899)

• "Beyond the Bayou" (1891)
• "A No-Account Creole" (1891)
• "At the 'Cadian Ball" (1892)
• Bayou Folk (1894)
• "The Locket" (1894)
• "The Story of an Hour" (1894) 
• "Lilacs" (1894)
• "A Respectable Woman" (1894)
• "Madame Celestin's Divorce" (1894)
• "Désirée's Baby" (1895) 
• "Athenaise" (1896)
• A Night in Acadie (1897)
• "A Pair of Silk Stockings" (1897)
• "The Storm" (1898) 

Chopin’s first published work was a short story printed in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch . Her early novel, At Fault , was rejected by an editor, so Chopin printed copies privately at her own expense. In her early work, Chopin addressed themes and experiences with which she was familiar: the North American 19-century Black activist movement, the complexities of the Civil War, the stirrings of feminism, and more.

Chopin's short stories included successes such as "A Point at Issue!", "A No-Account Creole", and "Beyond the Bayou.” Her work was published both in local publications and, eventually, national periodicals including the New York Times , The Atlantic , and Vogue . She also wrote non-fiction articles for local and national publications, but her focus remained on works of fiction.

During this era, “local color” pieces—works that featured folk tales, Southern dialect, and regional experiences—were gaining popularity. Chopin’s short stories were typically considered part of that movement rather than evaluated on their literary merits.

"Désirée's Baby,” published in 1893, explored the topics of racial injustice and interracial relationships (called "miscegenation" at the time) in French Creole Louisiana. The story highlighted the racism of the era, when possessing any African ancestry meant facing discrimination and danger from law and society. At the time Chopin was writing, this topic was generally kept out of public discourse; the story is an early example of her unflinching depictions of controversial topics of her day.

Thirteen stories, including “Madame Celestin’s Divorce,” were published in 1893. The following year, “ The Story of an Hour ,” about a newly widowed woman’s emotions, was first published in Vogue ; it went on to become one of Chopin's most famous short stories. Later that year, Bayou Folk , a collection of 23 short stories, was published. Chopin’s short stories, of which there were around a hundred, were generally well-received during her lifetime, especially when compared with her novels.

The Awakening and Critical Frustrations (1899-1904)

• The Awakening (1899)
• "The Gentleman from New Orleans" (1900)
• "A Vocation and a Voice" (1902)

In 1899, Chopin published the novel The Awakening , which would become her best-known work. The novel explores the struggle to formulate an independent identity as a woman in the late 19th century.

At the time of its publication, The Awakening was widely criticized and even censored for its exploration of female sexuality and questioning of restrictive gender norms. The St. Louis Republic called the novel "poison." Other critics praised the writing but condemned the novel on moral grounds, such as The Nation , which suggested that Chopin had wasted her talents and disappointed readers by writing about such “unpleasantness."

Following The Awakening ’s critical trouncing, Chopin’s next novel was canceled, and she returned to writing short stories. Chopin was discouraged by the negative reviews and never entirely recovered. The novel itself faded into obscurity and eventually went out of print. (Decades later, the very qualities that offended so many 19th century readers made The Awakening a feminist classic when it was rediscovered in the 1970s.)

Following The Awakening , Chopin continued to publish a few more short stories, but they were not entirely successful. She lived off of her investments and the inheritance left to her by her mother. Her publication of The Awakening damaged her social standing, and she found herself quite lonely once again.

Literary Styles and Themes

Chopin was raised in a largely female environment during an era of great change in America. These influences were evident in her works. Chopin did not identify as a feminist or suffragist, but her work is considered "protofeminist" because it took individual women seriously as human beings and complex, three-dimensional characters. In her time, women were often portrayed as two-dimensional figures with few (if any) desires outside of marriage and motherhood. Chopin's depictions of women struggling for independence and self-realization were unusual and groundbreaking.

Over time, Chopin’s work demonstrated different forms of female resistance to patriarchal myths , taking on different angles as themes in her work. Scholar Martha Cutter, for instance, traces the evolution of her characters’ resistance and the reactions they get from others within the world of the story. In some of Chopin’s earlier short stories, she presents the reader with women who overly resist patriarchal structures and are disbelieved or dismissed as crazy. In later stories, Chopin’s characters evolve: they adapt quieter, covert resistance strategies to achieve feminist ends without being immediately noticed and dismissed.

Race also played a major thematic role in Chopin’s works. Growing up in the era of enslavement and the Civil War, Chopin observed the role of race and the consequences of that institution and racism. Topics like miscegenation were often kept out of public discourse, but Chopin put her observations of racial inequality in her stories, such as "Désirée's Baby."

Chopin wrote in a naturalistic style and cited the influence of French writer Guy de Maupassant . Her stories were not exactly autobiographical, but they were drawn from her sharp observations of the people, places, and ideas that surrounded her. Because of the immense influence of her surroundings on her work—especially her observations of pre- and post-war Southern society—Chopin was sometimes pigeonholed as a regional writer.

On August 20, 1904, Chopin suffered a brain hemorrhage and collapsed during a trip to the St. Louis World’s Fair. She died two days later on August 22, at the age of 54. Chopin was buried in Calvary Cemetery in St. Louis, where her grave is marked with a simple stone with her name and dates of birth and death.

Although Chopin was criticized during her lifetime, she eventually became recognized as a leading early feminist writer. Her work was rediscovered during the 1970s , when scholars evaluated her work from a feminist perspective, noting Chopin's characters' resistance to patriarchal structures.

Chopin is also occasionally categorized alongside Emily Dickinson and Louisa May Alcott, who also wrote complex stories of women attempting to achieve fulfillment and self-understanding while pushing back against societal expectations. These characterizations of women who sought independence were uncommon at the time and thus represented a new frontier of women's writing.

Today, Chopin's work—particularly The Awakening —is frequently taught in American literature classes. The Awakening was also loosely adapted into a 1991 film called Grand Isle. In 1999, a documentary called Kate Chopin: A Reawakening told the story of Chopin's life and work. Chopin herself been featured less frequently in mainstream culture than other authors of her era, but her influence on the history of literature is undeniable. Her groundbreaking work paved the way for future feminist authors to explore topics of women's selfhood, oppression, and inner lives.

• Cutter, Martha. "Losing the Battle but Winning the War: Resistance to Patriarchal Discourse in Kate Chopin's Short Fiction". Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers . 68.
• Seyersted, Per. Kate Chopin: A Critical Biography. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State UP, 1985.
• Toth, Emily. Kate Chopin . William Morrow & Company, Inc., 1990.
• Walker, Nancy. Kate Chopin: A Literary Life . Palgrave Publishers, 2001.
•  “$42,000 in 1879 → 2019 | Inflation Calculator.” U.S. Official Inflation Data, Alioth Finance, 13 Sep. 2019, https://www.officialdata.org/us/inflation/1879?amount=42000.
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Kate Chopin

(1850-1904)

Kate Chopin was born on February 8, 1850, in St. Louis, Missouri. She began to write after her husband's death. Among her more than 100 short stories are "Désirée's Baby" and "Madame Celestin's Divorce." The Awakening (1899), a realistic novel about the sexual and artistic awakening of a young mother who abandons her family, was initially condemned for its sexual frankness but was later acclaimed. Chopin died in St. Louis, Missouri, on August 22, 1904.

QUICK FACTS

• Name: Kate Chopin
• Birth Year: 1850
• Birth date: February 8, 1850
• Birth State: Missouri
• Birth City: St. Louis
• Birth Country: United States
• Gender: Female
• Best Known For: Short-story writer and novelist Kate Chopin wrote The Awakening, a novel about a young mother who abandons her family, initially condemned but later acclaimed.
• Fiction and Poetry
• Astrological Sign: Aquarius
• Occupations
• Death Year: 1904
• Death date: August 22, 1904
• Death State: Missouri
• Death City: St. Louis
• Death Country: United States

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CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: Kate Chopin Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
• Website Name: The Biography.com website
• Url: https://www.biography.com/authors-writers/kate-chopin
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• Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
• Last Updated: April 16, 2019
• Original Published Date: April 2, 2014

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Kate Chopin

Introduction, general overviews.

• Primary Works
• Reference Works and Bibliographies
• General Essay Collections
• The Awakening
• Short Stories
• Race, Class, and Ethnicity
• Literary Genres
• Recent Directions in Chopin Studies

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Kate Chopin by Bernard Koloski LAST REVIEWED: 21 March 2024 LAST MODIFIED: 21 March 2024 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199827251-0007

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.

Readers new to Kate Chopin have a choice of good materials for coming to know her work, including materials by scholars from France, Norway, the United States, and Great Britain. Chopin became popular for our times only in the 1970s, after her fiction was championed first by a Frenchman, then by a Norwegian, and then by feminists and others in the United States and the United Kingdom. For the next twenty-five years, scholars occupied themselves writing introductions to her work, and many of their efforts remain valuable today. Seyersted 1969 is the most influential and the best place to begin, because it identifies many of the subjects, themes, and approaches that have dominated Chopin scholarship for decades. Ewell 1986 offers clear, straightforward, rewarding readings of Chopin’s fiction. Walker 2001 ties Chopin’s fiction closely to her life. Perrin-Chenour 2002 , writing in incisive French, outlines a unified approach to understanding Chopin’s breaks with mainstream thought in the 1890s. The Kate Chopin International Society website draws upon the insights of dozens of scholars and is a trustworthy starting point, especially for readers attuned to the Internet. And Beer 2008 gathers together fresh essays by practiced British and American scholars that bring newcomers up to date on the field of Chopin literary criticism.

Beer, Janet, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Kate Chopin . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Especially strong collection of Chopin critical essays by eleven experienced scholars from the United Kingdom and the United States. Explores both the novels and the short stories, as well as important subjects and themes, including childhood, race, fashion, and literary innovation. Approaches range from biography to contemporary French feminist theory. An excellent orientation for scholars new to Chopin studies.

Ewell, Barbara C. Kate Chopin . New York: Ungar, 1986.

Persuasive study presenting Chopin as social critic and artist. Explores in detail the novels and most popular stories. Insightful and balanced in presenting the career of the writer and the development and significance of her fiction.

Kate Chopin International Society .

The website of the Kate Chopin International Society, a network among scholars and a bridge between scholars and others, offering readers new to Chopin accurate, accessible, up-to-date information on her works, subjects, themes, and biography—and providing scholars extensive bibliographies in English, German, Portuguese, and Spanish, along with a guide to Chopin archives and news about academic conferences and Chopin’s fiction featured in popular culture.

Perrin-Chenour, Marie-Claude. Kate Chopin: Ruptures . Paris: Belin, 2002.

Inspired by the passion of Cyrille Arnavon, who translated The Awakening into French in 1952 and guided the Norwegian Per Seyersted to his groundbreaking work on Chopin, describes Chopin’s explorations of transitions in history, literary themes and styles, and epistemology. Argues that Chopin was successful with her early local-color efforts but ahead of the times with her later broader ones. An important volume. Available only in French.

Seyersted, Per. Kate Chopin: A Critical Biography . Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969.

By far the most influential book about Kate Chopin’s works. Discusses in depth Chopin’s novels and many of her most popular short stories, placing them in the realm of women’s literature. Describes Chopin’s life and the literary influences on her and points to subjects and themes that maintain their relevance and resonance today. A singularly important study—accessible for students; critical for scholars.

Walker, Nancy A. Kate Chopin: A Literary Life . Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2001.

Biographically focused discussion of Chopin’s work, with explorations of many of her short stories and essays. Includes two chapters on Chopin’s life before she began her writing career.

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The Awakening

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The Awakening , novel by Kate Chopin , published in 1899. Originally titled A Solitary Soul , the novel depicts a young mother’s struggle to achieve sexual and personal emancipation in the oppressive environment of the postbellum American South . When it was first published, it was widely condemned for its portrayal of sexuality and marital infidelity . Today it is considered a landmark work of early feminist fiction.

The Awakening opens on an island in Grand Isle , Louisiana, where 28-year-old Edna Pontellier is vacationing with her Creole husband, Léonce, and their two children, Etienne and Raoul. Léonce works during the week, leaving Edna to look after the children. Edna, however, spends most of her time with Madame Adèle Ratignolle, a fellow vacationer on the island. Charming, elegant, and subservient, Madame Ratignolle is the ideal “mother-woman.” Her identity is almost entirely subsumed by her familial role: she exists as if only to meet the needs and wants of her family. Ironically, it is Madame Ratignolle who catalyzes Edna’s “awakening.” Unlike Edna, Madame Ratignolle grew up around Creole women, who taught her to discuss and express her emotions freely. Her openness emboldens Edna, ultimately inspiring her to let go of her reservations.

Edna’s process of “awakening” is accelerated by Robert Lebrun, an attractive, charismatic young man whom Edna befriends on the island. At first, their relationship is innocent. They bathe and lounge together, exchanging jokes and stories (often in the company of Madame Ratignolle). The more time Edna spends with Robert, the more she resents the idea of the “mother-woman.” Through Robert, she begins to develop a sense of self apart from her social and domestic roles. As she recovers her independence, desires from her youth return. She starts painting again and recalls her past loves and infatuations. During this time, Edna is powerfully affected by music. When Mademoiselle Reisz—another vacationer on the island—plays the piano for her, she is moved to tears. That night, after weeks of unsuccessful attempts, Edna learns to swim.

By summer’s end, Edna and her husband have grown apart. Edna and Robert, on the other hand, have developed a romantic attachment. To avoid consummating their relationship, Robert decides to remove himself from the island and go to Mexico. He promises to write Edna, but she is nonetheless devastated by his departure. Not long after, the Pontelliers return to their home in New Orleans , where Edna, relinquishing her duties as a housewife, continues to develop her painting skills. She maintains her friendships with Madame Ratignolle and Mademoiselle Reisz, visiting the latter especially often. Mademoiselle Reisz sometimes receives letters from Robert, which she allows Edna to read. Mademoiselle Reisz suggests that Robert is in love with Edna; she observes that many of his letters are about her. While Mademoiselle Reisz encourages Edna to admit and perhaps even act upon her feelings for Robert, Edna’s worried husband seeks the help of Dr. Mandelet, a longtime family friend. Dr. Mandelet suspects Edna’s transformation is the result of an affair, but he does not voice his concern to Léonce. Instead, he tells him to let Edna’s behaviour run its course.

Léonce heeds the doctor’s orders. When he leaves for an extended business trip, his mother collects Etienne and Raoul, leaving Edna at home alone. Edna finds peace in the absence of her husband and children. Shortly after they leave, she decides to move out of their family home and into a nearby rental house, which she endearingly calls the “pigeon house.” Seeking financial independence, she begins selling her paintings. She also initiates an affair with the town womanizer, Alcée Arobin. Although she is sexually attracted to him, Edna has no romantic feelings for Arobin. She seems to use him as a stand-in for Robert, who, as far as she knows, is still in Mexico.

One afternoon, while waiting for Mademoiselle Reisz to return home, Edna encounters Robert. The meeting is awkward, and Edna wonders aloud why Robert did not seek her out upon his return. The tension between them is sustained until Robert visits the “pigeon house.” As Edna observes, “all the softness came back.” The tension is renewed after Robert takes his leave. The next time Robert visits the pigeon house, Edna, at last, kisses him, and he responds in kind. Although he admits he loves her, Robert insists he cannot be with Edna because she is a married woman and, as such, belongs to Léonce. Edna protests, arguing that she is not her husband’s property. Before Robert can respond, they are interrupted by Madame Ratignolle’s servant, who informs them that Madame Ratignolle “has taken sick.” As she leaves to tend to her friend, Edna asks Robert to wait for her.

When Edna comes home, Robert is gone. In his place is a note that reads, “I love you. Good-by—because I love you.” Edna does not sleep that night. Instead, she stays awake thinking about her children and her relationships. She realizes:

There was no one thing in the world that she desired. There was no human being whom she wanted near her except Robert; and she even realized that the day would come when he, too, and the thought of him would melt out of her existence, leaving her alone.

Shortly thereafter, Edna returns to Grand Isle. After greeting Robert’s brother, she goes to the beach, where she strips and wades, naked, into the water. Determined not to let anyone—including her children—possess her, Edna swims away from the shore. After a while, her limbs tire. Exhaustion overtakes her, and she drowns among the waves, finally and totally free.

The Awakening has been described as a case study of 19th-century feminism . One of the central themes in the novel is that of self-ownership. Also called bodily autonomy , self-ownership was a key tenet of 19th-century feminism. It signified a woman’s right to have control over her own body and identity. So-called first-wave feminists argued that women could gain their freedom only by refusing to allow other people—namely, men—to exercise control over their bodies. They focused, in particular, on a wife’s right to refuse sexual relations with her husband. Their argument was that a woman’s service as a wife and mother entitled her to ownership of her body and, therefore, the right to refuse to have sex or be impregnated.

The heroine of The Awakening longs for this kind of bodily autonomy. She is relentless in the pursuit of authority over her own person. Edna resists objectification by her husband, who looks at her “as one looks at a valuable piece of personal property.” She challenges Robert when he suggests that she is “not free” and must be “set…free” by her husband in order for them to be together. Her response to Robert clearly borrows from the rhetoric of first-wave feminists:

You have been a very, very foolish boy, wasting your time dreaming of impossible things when you speak of Mr. Pontellier setting me free! I am no longer one of Mr. Pontellier’s possessions to dispose of or not. I give myself where I choose. If he were to say, “Here, Robert, take her and be happy; she is yours,” I should laugh at you both.

In the end, she keeps to the vow she made upon moving into the pigeon house: she will “never again belong to another than herself.”

Edna’s story is laden with symbolism . The sea is perhaps the most important symbol in the novel. It variously represents baptism, cleansing, and rebirth. In The Awakening , Chopin constructs the sea as a space of freedom—a space outside and away from patriarchal society. For Edna the sea serves as a source of empowerment and a place of refuge. In the beginning it entices her with its “seductive odor” and “sonorous murmur.” Its entreaties are loving but imperative:

The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude; to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation. The voice of the sea speaks to the soul.

Chopin imbues the sea with maternal qualities, ultimately likening it to a womb, “enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace.” Although Edna longs for such comfort, she is uneasy in the water. Unless accompanied, she feels “a certain ungovernable dread.” Edna’s first solo swim thus marks a critical moment in her awakening. In learning to swim, Edna conquers her fears and takes control of her body. She effectively realizes her independence:

A feeling of exultation overtook her, as if some power of significant import had been given her to control the working of her body and her soul. She grew daring and reckless , overestimating her strength. She wanted to swim far out, where no woman had swum before.

In the water, Edna is reminded of the vastness of the universe and of her position within it. As she contemplates her significance (or lack thereof), her thoughts turn to death. Weeks later, when Edna reflects on the experience, she recalls the freedom she felt in the Gulf. With Robert gone and her solitude made plain, she resolves to return to the womb of the sea. In the last scene of the novel, Edna swims into the sea, naked as she came, “and the musky odor of pinks filled the air.”

Chopin began writing The Awakening in 1897. She completed the novel on January 21, 1898, and it was published by Herbert S. Stone & Company in Chicago on April 22, 1899. Chopin anticipated a warm reception for her novel. A month before its release, Book News had run a positive review praising the novel as “subtle and a brilliant kind of art.” To say that the novel was not received well is an understatement . Chopin’s portrayal of female marital infidelity shocked contemporary readers. Critics all over the United States condemned the novel as “morbid,” “unhealthy,” “not wholesome,” “vulgar,” “repellent,” and even “poison.” Edna’s character was described as “sensual and devilish” and “not good enough for heaven, [but] not wicked enough for hell.” As for Chopin herself, the Chicago Times-Herald determined “it was not necessary for a writer of so great refinement and poetic grace to enter the overworked field of sex fiction.” A few reviewers praised Chopin’s “cleverness.” The New York Times , for example, said the author “has a clever way of managing a difficult subject.” Chopin herself issued a statement responding to the negative press. The statement, which ran in the July 1899 issue of Book News , read:

Having a group of people at my disposal, I thought it might be entertaining (to myself) to throw them together and see what would happen. I never dreamed of Mrs. Pontellier making such a mess of things and working out her own damnation as she did. If I had had the slightest intimation of such a thing I would have excluded her from the company. But when I found out what she was up to, the play was half over and it was then too late.

Chopin defended herself and her novel to no avail. After its publication, the once-popular author was forced into financial crisis and literary obscurity. The Awakening went out of print for more than 50 years. When it was rediscovered in the 1950s, critics marveled at its modern sensibility. A second edition was published in 1964. Now widely read, The Awakening is critically acclaimed as an American version of Gustave Flaubert ’s Madame Bovary (1856) and a landmark feminist text.

• Time Periods

Kate Chopin (1850–1904)

Kate Chopin began and ended her life in St. Louis, with an interlude as a young wife and mother in New Orleans and rural Louisiana. Her stories of Creole life in Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana, established her as a talented local-color writer in the southern tradition. Some of her lesser-known stories explored the complexities of the emerging urban culture of the late nineteenth century. The Awakening , her second novel, won her a place in history, both as a writer and as a critic of women’s roles in the family and the community. Her early life and her mature experience in St. Louis influenced her perception of the human condition. A community of writers and intellectuals in St. Louis supported and shaped her literary life. Louisiana provided the setting for much of her fiction, but St. Louis provided the environment in which she created an important body of work.

Biographer Emily Toth has convincingly argued that Catherine O’Flaherty was born on February 8, 1850, not 1851, as previous biographers believed. Her father, Thomas O’Flaherty, was a successful Irish-born businessman with a son from a previous marriage. Her mother, Eliza Faris O’Flaherty, was the daughter of a French family with a history dating back to the founding of St. Louis. A great-grandmother, Victoire Verdun Charleville, shared stories of Kate’s Creole ancestors, which influenced Chopin’s later Creole tales. The O’Flaherty family owned slaves and occupied a handsome Greek Revival–style home. A neighbor, Kitty Garesche, became a schoolmate and lifelong friend. Kitty and Kate attended Sacred Heart Academy, a convent school. Kate left school for two years after her father’s death in November 1855 in the railroad disaster on the Gasconade Bridge that killed thirty prominent St. Louis citizens. Kate’s half brother, George, and her beloved great-grandmother both passed away in 1863. While St. Louis seethed with divisions during the Civil War period, Kate O’ Flaherty returned to school and graduated from the Sacred Heart Academy in 1868. As a student she read widely and began writing diary entries, poems, and short stories.

After her marriage to Oscar Chopin in 1870, Kate Chopin left St. Louis and began raising a family in Louisiana. Apparently, the couple spent several years in New Orleans before settling in Cloutierville, in Natchitoches Parish, where Oscar Chopin’s family had long owned a plantation. There they lived in a spacious timber-frame home with front and rear verandas. The landscape and the people of central Louisiana deeply impressed Kate Chopin and inspired many of her later published stories. Her Creole ancestry helped her to understand and sympathize with her Louisiana neighbors. Scholars have speculated about the extent to which the author’s own married life resembled the sad marriage in The Awakening , but there is no definitive answer to this question. Unlike the book’s character Leonce Pontellier, Oscar Chopin suffered recurrent fevers, probably aggravated by the moist climate and lack of medical services in rural Louisiana. In December 1882 he died.

A widow and the mother of six children, Kate Chopin returned to St. Louis in 1884 and there began her writing career. In 1889 the Chicago magazine America introduced her to the public by printing her poem “If It Might Be.” A local editor accepted her first published story that same year for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch . Other local journals, including William Marion Reedy ’s St. Louis Mirror and the St. Louis Criterion , carried her stories and essays. At her own expense she published her first novel, At Fault , in 1890. National magazines, including Vogue and Atlantic , carried her stories in the 1890s. Critics warmly praised the collection of Creole tales published as Bayou Folk in 1894. The stories in Bayou Folk and A Night in Acadie , published in 1897, established Chopin as a local-color writer with a gift for characterization.

Chopin’s Creole stories found a ready audience, partly because they did not challenge accepted images of southern life. In the bayou landscape of these stories, husbands could be cruel and wives could lead complex emotional lives, but they remained within social bonds defined by custom. Racial and class divisions limited interaction. In her famous story “Desiree’s Baby,” Chopin confronted the difficult issue of race, but failed to transcend common fears and stereotypes. Armand Aubigny accuses his wife, Desiree, of being black and bearing him a black child. Desiree, distraught, runs away through fields where black workers picked cotton. Unable to live with his rejection, she disappears, presumably ending her own life. Armand then discovers that his forebears, not Desiree’s, were black. Chopin presented the story as tragic irony, but did not clearly reject the racial ideology that caused Desiree’s death.

At Fault , Chopin’s first novel, took a more critical look at American life in the nineteenth century. Fanny Hosmer, an unattractive female character, exemplifies the alienation and futility of some middle­class women’s existence. Fanny is bored, shallow, and hopelessly alcoholic. Her husband, David, flees from her and her troubles to the world of Thérèse La Firme, a Creole widow in rural Louisiana. In contrast to the hard reality of St. Louis, the world of the bayou seems dreamlike, idyllic. Fanny, who represents the complexities of the modern city, simplifies matters for David and Thérèse by drowning in a flood. The bayou romance softens the novel. Nevertheless, the book offers a gritty portrait of an indolent middle-class woman, adrift in the city. Publishers showed no interest. Critics generally disliked or dismissed the self-published book.

Chopin spent her most creative years in the heart of a modern industrial city. In 1886, the year after her mother’s death, Chopin moved to a house on Morgan Street (now Delmar). Her neighbors included artists, musicians, tradesmen, and managers—people on the way up or down in a whirl of capitalistic enterprise. The David and Fanny Hosmers of the world passed by her doorstep. Robert E. Lee Gibson, a poet and the head clerk of the St. Louis Insane Asylum, became her ardent admirer. Logan Uriah Reavis , who wrote books promoting St. Louis as the future capital of the United States, wandered the streets in baggy clothes and dirty shirts. Chopin could ride the streetcar to every corner of her city or sit by her window and almost literally watch the city grow.

In stories with St. Louis settings, the author revealed a keen understanding of urban pretensions and reality. The central character in “A Pair of Silk Stockings” suddenly finds fifteen dollars and squanders it on all the temptations of St. Louis in the 1890s: shopping in a department store, dining in a restaurant, attending a matinee, and riding a cable car for miles. She enjoys her guilty pleasures, but her life seems purposeless. The title character in ‘‘The Blind Man” ambles through the city selling pencils. As he turns a corner, a speeding streetcar screeches to a halt. A prominent businessman who fails to see the car coming from the other direction dies under its wheels. The blind man wanders on, like the city itself, unaffected by the tragedy.

In “Miss McEnders,” an affluent woman does charity work among poor factory laborers, but responds coldly to her dressmaker, who reveals that she had an illegitimate child. McEnders suffers a crisis of conscience when she learns some hard truths about the questionable source of her father’s wealth. In these stories with urban settings, Chopin questions the materialism and moral blindness of modern society.

Chopin’s second novel, The Awakening , published in 1899, portrays the inner life of a woman who rejects her role as a businessman’s ornamental wife, but fails to define a place for herself in a cruelly judgmental community. Edna Pontellier’s closest friend is a woman who glories in motherhood, devoting all her energies to raising her children. Another woman friend lives the solitary life of a dedicated musician, rejecting companionship and pouring all her emotions into her art. Edna admires each of these women, but she cannot be like them. Leonce, her husband, regards her as a part of his household, one of his possessions, but not as a woman at the center of his life. Robert, the man she had loved, draws away from her out of fear and conventionality. A third man, who becomes her lover, offers her no fulfillment. A physician in the novel hints that he has dealt with other troubled, rebellious women like Edna. But Edna fails to connect with any of these possibly sympathetic souls. She possesses the courage to defy society’s rules, but she is unable to find a way to live in opposition to them. Feeling completely alone and finding no other path to liberation, Edna commits suicide. The novel challenged conventional values and shocked many critics.

Scathing reviews, condemning the novel as immoral, gave The Awakening the aura of a banned book. In fact, the book may never have been banned. Historians perpetuated the story, based on oral testimony, that the St. Louis Mercantile Library removed The Awakening from circulation. But Per Seyersted, an important Chopin biographer, questioned the story of the book’s banning. In twenty years of research, he found no documentation of the incident. Frequent retelling of the book-banning anecdote created an image of Chopin as a lonely iconoclast, rejected by her St. Louis neighbors—an image that distorted the truth.

Although she challenged accepted mores, Chopin was never as lonely as her heroine Edna Pontellier. Throughout her life she had numerous friends and supporters in her native city. Her connections with her mother’s family, her girlhood associates, and her own children remained strong throughout her life. Dr. Frederick Kohlbenheyer, her personal physician and intellectual companion, read many of her manuscripts. Kohlbenheyer had connections to the St. Louis literary establishment through an association with publisher Joseph Pulitzer . John A. Dillon , editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch , supported women’s rights and encouraged Chopin’s literary efforts. William Marion Reedy, the eccentric editor of the St. Louis Mirror , befriended the author and publicly praised her talent. The Mirror ’s reviewer vilified The Awakening , but a circle of close friends remained her champions to the end of her life. Sue V. Moore, a local editor, staunchly rebuffed the critics and came to the author’s defense. Local editors continued to accept her writings. Kate Chopin became a charter member of the Wednesday Club in 1890 and continued to associate with the intelligent and affluent women who made up its membership. She read “Ti Demon,” a Creole story, at a club meeting in November 1899, months after critics expressed shock at the content of The Awakening .

Sympathetic scholars have portrayed Kate Chopin in her final years as a tragic figure who failed to draw parallels between herself and Edna Pontellier, who chose death over life in a society that refused to let her grow. While Chopin produced no book-length work after The Awakening , she continued writing, publishing, and participating in the social life of her home city. The St. Louis Mirror , the St. Louis Post-Dispatch , and the St. Louis Republic published several of her stories and articles between 1899 and 1904. National magazines such as Vogue and Youth’s Companion continued to print her work.

Chopin’s death coincided with a celebration of progress, the St. Louis World’s Fair . By all accounts, she had great enthusiasm for the fair, more properly known as the Louisiana Purchase Exposition. She bought a season ticket and traveled the short distance from her home to the fairgrounds nearly every day. The fair offered a spectacle of electric lights, fantastic inventions, and artificial waterways. Bands played ragtime , a new music that challenged traditional rhythms and echoed the rapid cadence of city life. On August 20, 1904, a particularly hot day, Chopin returned from the fair and later suffered a hemorrhage of the brain. Two days later, with her children at her bedside, she died.

In the year of her death, St. Louisan Alexander De Menil praised Bayou Folk , slighted her novels, and defined Chopin as a Creole writer. For several decades this assessment of her work prevailed. In 1923 Fred Lewis Pattee identified her as a master of the American short story. Daniel Rankin, who published a full-length biography of Chopin in 1932, unearthed important information about her early life. Scholarly interest remained limited until the 1960s, when Larzer Ziff defined Chopin as an American realist with the stature of Theodore Dreiser. The Norwegian scholar Per Seyersted collected and published The Complete Works of Kate Chopin in 1969. His important biography of the author appeared in the same year. By the 1970s students of women’s history, as well as American literary history, flocked to libraries to study Chopin’s fiction. Dissertations and articles proliferated as the focus of critical attention shifted from her short stories to her 1899 novel. In the 1980s and 1990s, The Awakening became a popular text in college literature, women’s studies, and American studies classes.

Chopin ultimately gained fame as a realist rather than a local-color writer, a novelist rather than a short-story writer, a modernist rather than a teller of sentimental tales. She often chose rural settings for her fiction, but she lived in the city most of her life. The troubles of Edna Pontellier in The Awakening were the troubles of an affluent urban woman who spent her vacations on Grand Isle but lived in New Orleans. Her empty life resulted partially from traditional definitions of women’s roles, but mostly from the fact that those definitions no longer had meaning in urban America at the end of the nineteenth century. Chopin observed this emerging society in St. Louis in the 1880s and 1890s, the most creative years of her life. St. Louis influenced her thinking and nurtured her talent, while local editors, publishers, mentors, and friends encouraged her efforts.

Bonnie Stepenoff

Bonnie Stepenoff is professor emerita of history at Southeast Missouri State University.

Dictionary of Missouri Biography

• Further Reading

Chopin, Kate. The Complete Works of Kate Chopin . 2 vols. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969.

Koloski, Bernard, ed. Awakenings: The Story of the Kate Chopin Revival . Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009.

Rankin, Daniel. Kate Chopin and Her Creole Stories . Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1932.

Seyersted, Per. Kate Chopin: A Critical Biography . Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969.

Skaggs, Peggy. Kate Chopin . Boston: G. K. Hall, 1985.

Toth, Emily. Kate Chopin . New York: William Morrow, 1990.

Walker, Nancy H. Kate Chopin: A Literary Life . New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001.

Ziff, Larzer. The American 1890s: Life and Times of a Lost Generation . New York: Viking, 1966.

Published September 6, 2018; Last updated December 22, 2023

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Analysis Pages

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Kate Chopin Biography

Kate Chopin was born Katherine O’Flaherty on February 8, 1851, in St. Louis, Missouri, into a socially prominent family with roots in the French past of both St. Louis and New Orleans. Her father, Thomas O’Flaherty, an immigrant from Ireland, had lived in New York and Illinois before settling in St. Louis, where he prospered as the owner of a commission house. In 1839, he married into a well-known Creole family, members of the city’s social elite, but his wife died in childbirth only a year later. In 1844, he married Eliza Faris, merely fifteen years old but, according to French custom, eligible for marriage. Faris was the daughter of a Huguenot man who had migrated from Virginia and a woman who was descended from the Charlevilles, among the earliest French settlers in America.

Kate was one of three children born to her parents and the only one to live to mature years. In 1855, tragedy struck the O’Flaherty family when her father, now a director of the Pacific Railroad, was killed in a train wreck; thereafter, Kate lived in a house of many widows—her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother Charleville. In 1860, she entered the St. Louis Academy of the Sacred Heart, a Catholic institution where French history, language, and culture were stressed—as they were, also, in her own household. Such an early absorption in French culture would eventually influence Chopin’s own writing, an adaptation in some ways of French forms to American themes.

Chopin graduated from the Academy of the Sacred Heart in 1868, and two years later she was introduced to St. Louis society, becoming one of its ornaments, a vivacious and attractive girl known for her cleverness and talents as a storyteller. The following year, she made a trip to New Orleans, and it was there that she met Oscar Chopin, whom she married in 1871. After a three-month honeymoon in Germany, Switzerland, and France, the couple moved to New Orleans, where Chopin’s husband was a cotton factor (a businessman who financed the raising of cotton and transacted its sale). Oscar Chopin prospered at first, but in 1878 and 1879, the period of the great “Yellow Jack” epidemic and of disastrously poor harvests, he suffered reverses. The Chopin family then went to live in rural Louisiana, where, at Cloutierville, Oscar Chopin managed some small plantations he owned.

By all accounts, the Chopin marriage was an unusually happy one, and in time Kate became the mother of six children. This period in her life ended, however, in 1883 with the sudden death, from swamp fever, of her husband. A widow at thirty, Chopin remained at Cloutierville for a year, overseeing her husband’s property, and then moved to St. Louis, where she remained for the rest of her life. She began to write in 1888, while still rearing her children, and in the following year she made her first appearance in print. As her writing shows, her marriage to Oscar Chopin proved to be much more than an “episode” in her life, for it is from this period in New Orleans and Natchitoches Parish that she drew her best literary material and her strongest inspiration. She knew this area personally, and yet as an “outsider” she was also able to observe it with the freshness of detachment.

Considering the fact that she had only begun to have her stories published in 1889, it is remarkable that Chopin should already have written and published her first novel, At Fault , by 1890. The novel is apprenticeship work and was published by a St. Louis company at her own expense, but it does show a sense of form. She then wrote a second novel, “Young Dr. Gosse,” which in 1891 she sent out to a number of publishers, all of whom refused it, and which she later destroyed. After finishing this second novel, she concentrated on the shorter forms of fiction, writing forty stories, sketches, and vignettes during the next three years. By 1894, her stories began to find a reception in eastern magazines, notably in Vogue , The Atlantic...

(The entire page is 1,202 words.)

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Biography of Kate Chopin

Published in 1899, The Awakening created a scandal because of its portrayal of a strong, unconventional woman involved in an adulterous affair. While Kate Chopin never flouted convention as strongly as did her fictitious heroine, she did exhibit an individuality and iconoclasm remarkable for upper-middle-class women of the time.

Born on February 8, 1850, in St. Louis, Katherine O'Flaherty was the daughter of an immigrant Irish father and a French Creole mother. The O'Flahertys were members of the Creole social elite and were fairly well-off. When Kate was very young, her father Thomas O'Flaherty died in a work-related accident. He left behind a family of four generations of women all living in the same house. Kate was very close to her maternal great-grandmother, Madame Charleville, who first introduced her to the world of storytelling. Madame Charleville spoke only French to Kate and told her elaborate, somewhat risqué stories.

Family tragedy surrounded the young Kate. When she was eleven, Madame Charleville died, and her half-brother George was killed while fighting in the Civil War for the Confederate side. Yet, Kate seems not to have completely despaired; she earned a reputation as the "Littlest Rebel" when she tore down a Union flag that had been tied to her front porch by Yankee soldiers. Had Kate not been a young girl at the time, the incident might have resulted in serious consequences, but since she was, her act became famous as a local legend.

While attending a Catholic high school, Kate studied both French and English literature and became an accomplished pianist. She attended numerous social events and became very popular in St. Louis high society. She also became interested in the movement for women's suffrage, although she never became very politically active. When she was nineteen, she married Oscar Chopin, a twenty-five-year-old French-Creole businessman. The couple moved to New Orleans, Louisiana, and later moved to Cloutierville in north central Louisiana.

Kate and Oscar were very happy together and, like the Pontelliers in The Awakening , soon became immersed in aristocratic Louisiana society. A gentle man, Oscar tolerated Kate's "unconventional" ways, even though relatives warned him not to. He treated Kate as an intellectual equal and apparently did not mind that she smoked, drank, and behaved as her own person. However, Kate's period of married happiness did not last for long. After giving birth to six children, Kate became a widow in 1883 when her husband died of swamp fever.

Luckily, Oscar Chopin had been a successful businessman, and Kate did not have to worry about feeding her six children. She managed her husband's business for a year but then moved back to St. Louis, only to have her mother die the following year.

During this period of her life, she had one close friend named Dr. Frederick Kolbenheyer. Dr. Kolbenheyer was initially Kate's obstetrician and her mother's neighbor, but he soon came to play a very important role in her life. Because of his influence, Kate began to study science, decided to abandon her Catholicism, and started to write and publish.

In 1890, Kate Chopin wrote At Fault , her first novel. She also initially wrote a number of short stories, which were published in various magazines. Among her most famous short stories were "Désirée's Baby," which was published in her 1894 short story collection Bayou Folk and which details the fallout of the birth of a child of mixed race, and "The Story of an Hour," which describes the reaction of a woman who learns of her husband's death and dreams of her future independence. In 1897, she published another collection of short fiction, A Night in Acadie .

Chopin liked her writing to be spontaneous, and she generally wrote her stories all at once, with little or no revision. She also wrote in the living room, where her six children would constantly interrupt her. Kate also maintained her other interests, such as music; she generally wrote only one or two days a week and spent the other days going to musical or theatrical performances.

Chopin's stories often deal with marriage and present an unconventional perspective on the theme. Her characters face choices between what society expects of them and what they really desire, and they usually decide to follow their own path rather than that of society. In her fiction, Chopin explores the special problems and dilemmas that women face, and her stories often argue suggest that women want sex—or even independence. All of these themes appear in Kate Chopin's second and final novel, The Awakening , which she published in 1899. The novel caused a great deal of controversy because of what most critics perceived as her immorality, although the New York Times Book Review praised her writing.

After the public uproar over The Awakening , Chopin wrote only seven short stories between 1900 and 1904. Her life ended on August 22, 1904, after she suffered a stroke while visiting the St. Louis World's Fair. However, decades after her death, literary critics rediscovered her work and began to celebrate her stories for their strong perspectives on female independence and sexuality.

Study Guides on Works by Kate Chopin

At fault kate chopin.

At Fault is Kate Chopin’s first novel which was written between July 1889 and April 1890. Upon completion, she submitted it to Bedford’s Monthly; a literary journal that made room for one novel in each issue. Upon rejection, Chopin decided to...

• Study Guide

The Awakening Kate Chopin

The Awakening was published in 1899, and it immediately created a controversy. Kate Chopin's contemporaries were shocked by her depiction of a woman with active sexual desires, who dares to leave her husband and have an affair. Instead of...

• Lesson Plan

Desiree's Baby Kate Chopin

"Desiree's Baby" is the most famous of Kate Chopin's many short stories. It is set before the American Civil War on two plantations in Louisiana: that of the Valmondés and of the Aubignys. The story is about a baby and racial tension between a...

Kate Chopin's Short Stories Kate Chopin

After her early upbringing as a child of Irish and French Creole descent in the upper class of St. Louis in the decades surrounding the Civil War, Kate Chopin married Oscar Chopin, a Creole businessman, and moved with him to New Orleans. In New...

The Storm Kate Chopin

Despite the fact that Kate Chopin’s “The Storm” is one of the author's more anthologized works, not many readers are aware that this is actually a sequel to a previous story writtin in 1892 called "At the 'Cadian Ball." The central characters...

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Kate Chopin : a critical biography

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Reprint of the ed. published (1969) by Universitetsforlaget, Oslo, and Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge, in the series: Publications of the American Institute, University of Oslo. "...no changes have been made in this reprint of my 1969 book."--P. [7] Includes bibliography (p. [230]-237) and index.

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Kate Chopin: A Critical Biography (Southern Literary Studies) Paperback – April 1, 1980

Kate Chopin was a nationally acclaimed short story artist of the local color school when she in 1899 shocked the American reading public with The Awakening , a novel which much resembles Madame Bovary . Though the critics praised the artistic excellence of the book, it was generally condemned for its objective treatment of the sensuous, independent heroine. Deeply hurt by the censure, Mrs. Chopin wrote little more, and she was soon forgotten. For decades the few critics who remembered her concentrated on the regional aspects of her work. In the Literary History of the United States , where Kate Chopin is highly praised as a local colorist, The Awakening is not even mentioned. In recent years, however, a few critics have given new attention to the novel, emphasizing its courageous realism. In the present book, Mr. Seyersted carries out an extensive re-examination of both the life and work of the author, basing it on her total oeuvre. Much new Kate Chopin material, such as previously unknown stories, letters, and a diary, has recently come to light. We can now see that she was a much more ambitious and purposeful writer than we have hitherto known. From the beginning, her special theme was female self-assertion. As each new success increased her self-confidence, she grew more and more daring in her descriptions of emancipated woman who wants to dictate her own life. Mr. Seyersted traces the author’s growth as an artist and as a penetrating interpreter of the female condition, and shows how her career culminated in The Awakening and the unknown story ‘The Storm.’ With these works, which were decades ahead of their time, Kate Chopin takes her place among the important American realist writers of the 1890’s.

• Print length 252 pages
• Language English
• Publisher LSU Press
• Publication date April 1, 1980
• Dimensions 5.5 x 0.57 x 8.5 inches
• ISBN-10 080710678X
• ISBN-13 978-0807106785
• See all details

Editorial Reviews

About the author, product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ LSU Press (April 1, 1980)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 252 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 080710678X
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0807106785
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 11.2 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 0.57 x 8.5 inches
• #4,386 in American Literature Criticism
• #13,156 in Author Biographies
• #26,487 in Women's Biographies

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KateChopin.org

The kate chopin international society, we provide a network and forum for the study of american author kate chopin..

We encourage and support scholarship and activities that illuminate Chopin’s contribution to the American literary tradition, and we seek to preserve her literary significance for future generations.

If you’re a scholar or advanced graduate student interested in conference presentations or scholarly journals, you may want to check our page for scholars .

About this website.

About the authors and editors of this website., our history.

The Kate Chopin International Society was formed in 2004 by Heather Ostman and Avis Hewitt, both English professors at American universities, after the conference of the American Literature Association, an organization made up of scholarly societies devoted to the study of American authors. Most better-known American authors have a society of their own, and Heather and Avis thought Kate Chopin deserved a scholarly society focused on her work, even though the Kate Chopin Society of North America, with a different emphasis, already existed in St. Louis.

The society created an advisory board made up mostly of Chopin specialists and sponsored panels at the 2005 ALA conference, as well as at ALA conferences each year since then , and sponsored special panels at the 2014 conferen ce (held in Washington, DC, in late May). We also sponsor panels at other conferences.

Our officers and our website staff

Heather Ostman continues as president of the society. Kelli P. O’Brien is the conference coordinator.

On the advisory board as of 2023 are Heather (State University of New York: Westchester Community College), Thomas Bonner (Xavier University of Louisiana), Christina G. Bucher (Berry College), Barbara Ewell (Loyola University of New Orleans), Bernard Koloski (Commonwealth University of Pennsylvania), Kathleen Butterly Nigro (University of Missouri–St. Louis), Mary Papke (University of Tennessee), John Staunton (Eastern Michigan University), and Emily Toth (Louisiana State University).

The KateChopin.org website staff:

The co-editors of KateChopin.org are Bernard Koloski (Commonwealth University of Pennsylvania) and Heather Ostman (State University of New York: Westchester Community College)

The site’s general bibliographer is Barbara Ewell (Loyola University of New Orleans). The site’s associate editors are Anna Elfenbein (West Virginia University), Bonnie James Shaker (Kent State University at Geauga), and David Z. Wehner (Mount St. Mary’s University). The site’s pages dealing with Chopin’s Children’s Stories and Kate Chopin Archives are edited by Bonnie James Shaker (Kent State University at Geauga). The site’s bibliography page in German is edited by Heidi Podlasli-Labrenz (University of Bremen, Germany). The site’s bibliography page in Portuguese is edited by Cido Rossi (São Paulo State University, Brazil). The site’s bibliography page in Spanish is edited by Eulalia Piñero Gil (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain).

Members of the website advisory committee include Tom Bonner (Xavier University of Louisiana), Barbara Ewell (Loyola University of New Orleans), Beth Jensen (Georgia State University Perimeter College), Kathleen Butterly Nigro (University of Missouri–St. Louis), Kelli P. O’Brien (University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff), Kate O’Donoghue (Suffolk County Community College), Eulalia Piñero Gil (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain), and Emily Toth (Louisiana State University).

Related scholarly organizations :

ALA : American Literature Association

MLA : Modern Language Association

SSAWW: Society for the Study of American Women Writers

SSSL : Society for the Study of Southern Literature

PCA: Popular Culture Association