Biography of Kate Chopin
Kate Chopin (1851–1904) was born in St. Louis. Her father died when she was four, and she was raised by her Creole mother’s family. In 1870 she married Oscar Chopin, a cotton broker. They lived in Louisiana, first in New Orleans and then on a large plantation among the French–speaking Acadians. Upon her husband’s death, Chopin tried to run his business herself but in 1884 decided to return to her mother’s home in St. Louis.
Friends encouraged her to write, and when she was nearly forty years old she published her first novel, At Fault (1890). Her stories began to appear in Century and Harper’s Magazine, and two collections followed: Bayou Folk (1894) and A Night in Arcadie (1897). Her last major work, the novel The Awakening (1899), is her masterpiece, but its sympathetic treatment of adultery shocked reviewers and readers throughout America. In St. Louis the novel was taken out of the libraries, and Chopin was denied membership in the St. Louis Fine Arts Club. When her third collection of stories was rejected by her publishers at the end of 1899, Chopin felt herself a literary outcast; she wrote very little in the last years of her life.
What affronted the genteel readers of the 1890s was Chopin’s attempt to write frankly about women’s emotions in their relations with men, children, and their own sexuality. After her mother’s death in 1885, she stopped being a practicing Catholic and accepted the Darwinian view of human evolution. Seeking God in nature rather than through the Church, Chopin wrote freely on the subjects of sex and love, but she said she sadly learned that for American authors, "the limitations imposed upon their art by their environment hamper a full and spontaneous expression."
Chopin’s work was rediscovered in the 1960s, and a third collection of stories A Vocation and a Voice was published posthumously in 1991.
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