Kate Chopin
Catherine (Kate) O'Flaherty was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on February 8, 1850, the second child of Thomas O'Flaherty of County Galway, Ireland, and Eliza Faris of St. Louis. Kate's family on her mother's side was of French extraction, and Kate grew up speaking both French and English. She was bilingual and bicultural--feeling at home in different communities with quite different values--and the influence of French life and literature on her thinking is noticeable throughout her fiction.
From 1855 to 1868 Kate attended the St. Louis Academy of the Sacred Heart, with one year at the Academy of the Visitation. As a girl, she was mentored by woman--by her mother, her grandmother, and her great grandmother, as well as by the Sacred Heart nuns. Kate formed deep bonds with her family members, with the sisters who taught her at school, and with her life-long friend Kitty Garasché. Much of the fiction Kate wrote as an adult draws on the nurturing she received from women as she was growing up.
Her early life had a great deal of trauma. In 1855, her father was killed in a railroad accident. In 1863 her beloved French-speaking great grandmother died. Kate spent the Civil War in St. Louis, a city where residents supported both the Union and the Confederacy and where her family had slaves in the house. Her half brother enlisted in the Confederate army, was captured by Union forces, and died of typhoid fever.
From 1867 to 1870 Kate kept a commonplace book in which she recorded diary entries and copied passages of essays, poems, and other writings. In 1869 she wrote a little sketch, "Emancipation: A Life Fable.
Around age nineteen, through social events held at Oakland, a wealthy estate near St. Louis, Kate met Oscar Chopin of Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana, whose French father had taken the family to Europe during the Civil War. "I am going to be married," Kate confided in her commonplace book, "married to the right man. It does not seem strange as I had thought it would--I feel perfectly calm, perfectly collected. And how surprised everyone was, for I had kept it so secret!" Kate and Oscar were married in 1870.
On their wedding trip the couple traveled to Cincinnati, Philadelphia, and New York, and then crossed the Atlantic and toured Germany, Switzerland, and France. They saw Paris only briefly, in September, 1870, during the Franco-Prussian War, at a moment when the city was preparing for a long siege. Kate never visited Europe again.
Back in the States, the couple settled in New Orleans, where Oscar established a business as a cotton factor, dealing with cotton and other commodities (corn, sugar, and molasses). Louisiana was in the midst of Reconstruction at the time, and the city was beset with economic and racial troubles. Oscar joined the notorious White League, a Democratic group that in 1874 had a violent confrontation with Republican Radicals, causing President Grant to send in federal troops.
Between 1871 and 1879 she gave birth to five sons and a daughter--in order of birth, Jean Baptiste, Oscar Charles, George Francis, Frederick, Felix Andrew, and Lélia (baptized Marie Laïza).
In 1879 the Chopins moved to Cloutierville, a small French village in Natchitoches Parish, in northwestern Louisiana, after Oscar closed his New Orleans business because of hard financial times.
Oscar bought a general store in Cloutierville, but in 1882 he died of malaria--and Kate became a widow at age thirty-two, with the responsibility of raising six children. She never remarried.
Kate had an affair with a local planter. But she then moved with her family back to St. Louis where she found better schools for her children and a richer cultural life for herself. Shortly after, in 1885, her mother died.
Dr. Frederick Kolbenheyer, her obstetrician and a family friend, encouraged her to write. Influenced by Guy de Maupassant and other writers, French and American, Kate began to compose fiction, and in 1889 one of her stories appeared in the St. Louis Post Dispatch. In 1890 her first novel, At Fault, was published privately.
At Fault offers a compelling glimpse into what Kate Chopin was thinking about as she began her writing career. The book is about a thirtyish Catholic widow in love with a divorced man. Like Edna Pontellier in The Awakening, Thérèse Lafirme struggles to reconcile her "outward existence" with her "inward life." She cannot as a practicing Catholic accept the idea of divorce, yet she cannot banish from her life the man whom she loves.
Chopin completed a second novel, to have been called Young Dr. Gosse and Théo, but her attempt to find a publisher failed and she later destroyed the manuscript. She became active in St. Louis literary and cultural circles, discussing the works of many writers, including Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Émile Zola, and George Sand (she had called her daughter Lélia, apparently after the title of Sand's 1833 novel).

During the next decade, although maintaining an active social life, she plunged into her work and kept accurate records of when she wrote her hundred or so short stories, which magazines she submitted them to, when they were accepted (or rejected) and published, and how much she was paid for them.
In 1889 she wrote "A Point at Issue!" and in 1891 rewrote "A No-Account Creole" (which she had originally written in 1888) and wrote the children's story "Beyond the Bayou" and other stories. Five of her stories appeared in regional and national magazines, including Youth's Companion and Harper's Young People.
She wrote "Désirée’s Baby" and the little sketch "Ripe Figs" in 1892. "At the 'Cadian Ball" appeared in Two Tales that year, and eight of her other stories were published. The next year she wrote "Madame Célestin's Divorce," and thirteen of her stories were published. Chopin traveled to New York and Boston to seek a publisher for a novel and a collection of stories.
In 1894 she wrote "Lilacs" and "Her Letters." "The Story of an Hour" and "A Respectable Woman" appeared in Vogue. And Houghton Mifflin published Bayou Folk, a collection of twenty-three of Chopin's stories.
The Awakening, her most famous work, was verified by critics when it was published in 1899, even banned by the public library of the city in which its author was born. The Awakening found a more receptive audience in the late Twentieth century when it was recognized that Kate Chopin’s treatment of Edna Pontellier anticipated the importance that women’s issues would play in contemporary culture. Some critics treat The Awakening as a modern novel whose author accordingly left questions open for resolution by the reader.
Readers claimed the novel’s focus on the sexual awakening of a young married woman was pornographic and immoral. The negative response, coupled with her inability to publish another collection of short stories due to their controversial subject matter, tarnished her reputation and effectively ended her literary career, although she continued to write.
In 1904, she began to have health problems, and on August 22 of that year, she died in St. Louis of a cerebral hemorrhage. Since her death, her literary reputation has grown considerably. She is now considered to be one of the most important American realists.

Cite Page

Doris Davis. (2004). The Enigma at the Keyboard: Chopin's Mademoiselle Reisz. The Mississippi Quarterly, 58(1/2), 89-104. Retrieved March 23, 2011, from Humanities Module. (Document ID: 1126824081).

Jamil, S.. (2009). Emotions in THE STORY OF AN HOUR. The Explicator, 67(3), 215-220. Retrieved March 23, 2011, from Research Library Core. (Document ID: 1737402271).

Patricia L Bradley. (2005). The Birth of Tragedy and The Awakening: Influences and Intertextualities. Southern Literary Journal, 37(2), 40-61. Retrieved March 23, 2011, from Humanities Module. (Document ID: 839431861).

Tucker, Susan. (1996). A solitary soul: The life of Kate Chopin. English Journal, 85(3), 104. Retrieved March 23, 2011, from Research Library Core. (Document ID: 9376309).