Kate Chopin Biography

American author Kate Chopin (1850–1904) wrote two novels and about a hundred short stories in the 1890s. Most of her fiction is set in Louisiana and most of her best-known work focuses on the lives of sensitive, intelligent women.

Her short stories were well received in her own time and were published by some of America's most prestigious magazines—Vogue, the Atlantic Monthly, Harper's Young People, Youth's Companion, and the Century. A few stories were syndicated by the American Press Association. Her stories appeared also in her two published collections, Bayou Folk (1894) and A Night in Acadie (1897), both of which received good reviews from critics across the country. About a third of her stories are children's stories—those published in or submitted to children's magazines or those similar in subject or theme to those that were. By the late 1890s Kate Chopin was well known among American readers of magazine fiction.

Her early novel At Fault (1890) had not been much noticed by the public, but The Awakening (1899) was widely condemned. Critics called it morbid, vulgar, and disagreeable. Willa Cather, who would become a well known twentieth-century American author, labeled it trite and sordid. Some modern scholars have written that the novel was banned at Chopin's hometown library in St. Louis, but this claim has not been able to be verified, although in 1902, the Evanston, Illinois, Public Library removed The Awakening from its open shelves. Chopin's third collection of stories, to have been called A Vocation and a Voice, was for unknown reasons cancelled by the publisher and did not appear as a separate volume until 1991.

Chopin's novels were mostly forgotten after her death in 1904, but in the 1920s her short stories began to appear in anthologies, and slowly people again came to read her. In the 1930s a Chopin biography appeared which spoke well of her short fiction but dismissed The Awakening as unfortunate. However, by the 1950s scholars and others recognized that the novel is an insightful and moving work of fiction. Such readers set in motion a Kate Chopin revival, one of the more remarkable literary revivals in the United States.

After 1969, when a biography sympathetic to The Awakening was published, along with an edition of her complete works, Kate Chopin became known throughout the world. She has attracted great attention from scholars and students, and her work has been translated into other languages, including French, Portuguese, Dutch, Polish, Korean, and Czech. She is today understood as a classic writer who speaks eloquently to contemporary concerns. The Awakening, "The Storm," "The Story of an Hour," "Désirée's Baby," and other stories appear in countless editions and are embraced by people for their sensitive, graceful, poetic depictions of women's lives.

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 plenty of trauma. In 1855, her father was killed in a railroad accident. In 1863 her beloved French-speaking great grandmother died. She 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 her first story, "Emancipation: A Life Fable."

At eighteen, Kate was an "Irish Beauty," her friend Kitty later said, with "a droll gift of mimicry" and a passion for music. At about nineteen, through social events held at Oakland, a wealthy estate near St. Louis (the house is pictured at the top of this site's home page), 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, among them). Louisiana was in the midst of Reconstruction at the time, and the city was beset with economic and racial troubles. Oscar joined the White League, a Democratic group that in 1874 had a violent confrontation with Republican Radicals, causing President Grant to send in federal troops.

But New Orleans also offered superb music at the French Opera House, along with fine theatre, horse races, and Mardi Gras. Like other wealthy families in the city, the Chopins would go by boat to vacation on Grand Isle, a Creole resort in the Gulf of Mexico. Kate may have met the French painter Edgar Degas, who lived in New Orleans for several months around 1872. She would have been observing life in the city, gathering material that she could draw upon for her fiction later in life.

Between 1871 and 1879 she gave birth to five sons and a daughter.

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; he 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.

In 1883 and 1884, Chopin's recent biographer, Emily Toth, has shown, 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, Chopin 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. She 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 1891 she wrote "A No-Account Creole" and other stories. Five of her stories appeared in regional and national magazines, including Youth's Companion and Harper's Young People.

In 1892 she wrote "Désirée’s Baby." "At the 'Cadian Ball" appeared in Two Tales, and eight of her other stories were published. In 1893 "Désirée's Baby" appeared in Vogue. Twelve other stories were published. Chopin traveled to New York and Boston to seek a publisher for a novel and a collection of stories.

In 1894 Chopin wrote "Lilacs." She began a diary, "Impressions," which she continued for two years. "The Story of an Hour" and "A Respectable Woman" appeared in Vogue and "A No-Account Creole" and two other stories in the Century. Houghton Mifflin published Bayou Folk, a collection of twenty-three of Chopin's stories. Chopin traveled to a conference of the Western Association of Writers in Indiana.

In 1895 Chopin wrote "Athénaïse" and twelve of her stories were published. In 1896 she wrote "A Pair of Silk Stockings." "Athénaïse" was published in the Atlantic Monthly. In 1897 Way and Williams (of Chicago) published A Night in Acadie, a collection of twenty-one Chopin stories. Her grandmother, Athénaïse Charleville Faris, died.

In 1897 and 1898 she wrote The Awakening and in 1898 the short story, "The Storm," which, because of its sexual content, she did not send out to publishers. Probably no mainstream American publisher would have printed the story. In 1899 one of her stories appeared in the Saturday Evening Post. "In the Confidence of a Story-Writer," an essay, was published by the Atlantic Monthly. Herbert S. Stone published The Awakening.

In 1900 two of her stories were published in Vogue. Herbert S. Stone, for unknown reasons, canceled her contract for A Vocation and a Voice, a third collection of her stories. In 1902 "A Vocation and a Voice," the title story of Chopin's proposed volume, was published in the St. Louis Mirror. Her last published story appeared in Youth's Companion.

In 1904 Kate Chopin bought a season ticket for the famous St. Louis World's Fair, which was located not far from her home. It had been hot in the city all that summer, and Saturday, August 20, was especially hot, so when Chopin returned home from the fair, she was very tired. She called her son at midnight complaining of a pain in her head. Doctors thought that she had had a cerebral hemorrhage.

She lapsed into unconsciousness the next day and died on August 22.

About Kate Chopin biographies:

The most recent and most influential biography of Kate Chopin is Emily Toth's Unveiling Kate Chopin (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999). Emily Toth earlier published a longer biography, Kate Chopin (New York: Morrow, 1990).

An also important biography is Per Seyersted's Kate Chopin: A Critical Biography (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969).

Out of print today but influential before Per Seyersted's 1969 biography is Daniel Rankin's Kate Chopin and Her Creole Stories (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1932.)

Biographical question: Can you help with the identity of Mrs. F. M. Estere of 4434 Laclede Avenue of St. Louis and her possible connection with Kate Chopin? If you have any information about Mrs. F. M. Estere, would you please email us?