Kate OFlaherty Chopin

Home > People > Literature and the Arts > American Literature: Biographies

Kate O'Flaherty Chopin , 1851–1904, American author, b. St. Louis. Of Creole-Irish descent, she married (1870) a Louisiana businessman and lived with him in Natchitoches parish and New Orleans. In these places she acquired an intimate knowledge of Creole and Cajun life, upon which she was to draw in many of her stories. After her husband's death in 1883, she returned with their six children to St. Louis and there began to write. Two collections of tales, Bayou Folk (1894) and A Night in Acadie (1897), earned her a reputation as a local colorist, but her novel The Awakening (1899) caused a storm of criticism because of its treatment of feminine sexuality. In depicting objectively a woman's confused groping toward self-understanding and self-acceptance, Chopin seemed to threaten the mores of her time although she did not explicitly attack them. Largely ignored for the next 60 years, her work is now praised for its literary merit as well as for its remarkable independence of mind and feeling.

Bibliography: See her complete works, ed. by P. Seyersted (2 vol., 1969) and ed. by S. M. Gilbert (2002); her private papers, ed. by E. Toth et al. (1998); T. Bonner, Jr., The Kate Chopin Companion (1988); biographies by E. Toth (1988 and 1999).

Chopin, Kate [O'flaherty] (1851–1904), St. Louis author, from her marriage to a Louisiana Creole until his death (1882) lived in New Orleans and on a Louisiana cotton plantation. Returning to her native city, she began to write tales for children and the local‐color stories for which she is noted. At Fault (1890) is an undistinguished novel of Creole life in the Cane River section of central Louisiana. Her importance in the local‐color movement depends primarily, however, on her interpretations of Creole and Cajun life in her collections of short stories and anecdotes, Bayou Folk (1894) and A Night in Acadie (1897). These carefully polished tales are delicately objective in treatment and marked by a poignant restraint of which perhaps the greatest example is Désirée's Baby in the former volume. Mrs. Chopin's last novel, The Awakening (1899), caused a storm of criticism that ended her literary career because readers of the time were shocked not only by the story of a Southern lady's revolt against her husband and love of a young man but by the frank sense of sexuality.

Chopin, Kate, née O'Flaherty (1850–1904), born in St Louis, Missouri, daughter of an Irish immigrant father and Creole mother. She married Oscar Chopin, a Creole, and went to live in New Orleans, Louisiana. Her husband died of swamp fever in 1882, leaving her with six children. After paying off his debts she returned to St Louis and began to write, using as material her memories of New Orleans and of Cane River, the latter providing material for three collections of short stories. She won posthumous recognition for The Awakening (1899), which tells the story of Edna Pontellier, married to a successful Creole business man, and leading a life of leisure; she commits adultery with one young man, while believing herself in love with another, and on the last page swims naked out to sea and presumably drowns. It was considered scandalous and morbid. Discouraged by its hostile reception, Chopin turned to poems, essays, and short stories.