American author Kate Chopin (1850–1904) wrote two published 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, including Vogue and the Atlantic Monthly. Her early novel At Fault (1890) was not much noticed by the public, but The Awakening (1899) was widely condemned. Critics called it morbid, vulgar, and disagreeable (continue)

Questions and answers about Kate Chopin
Quotes from Kate Chopin: In Her Own Words
Recent books about Kate Chopin
New: A Brazilian translation of Chopin stories
New: A French translation with a different emphasis
New: A bust of Kate Chopin in St. Louis
Kim Basinger to record The Awakening
A graphic version of "The Story of an Hour"
A new film based on Chopin's "Her Letters"
Japanese translations of Chopin works
Kate Chopin and Vogue
How to pronounce "Athénaïse"
Kate Chopin as a Southern Novelist
Kate Chopin in popular culture

Question: How do you pronounce "Chopin"?

Answer: In the French way, like that of the composer, Frédéric Chopin—in English, something like SHOW-pan.

Q: When was Kate Chopin born? Some internet sites say 1851 and others 1850.

A: Her tombstone says 1851, but thirty years ago a French scholar revealed that the United States census and her baptismal certificate (no birth certificate exists) show that Chopin was born on February 8, 1850. The Library of Congress in September, 2009, accepted the corrected date, but some printed sources and web sites still give her birth date as 1851.

Q: Was Kate born a Chopin or is that her married name?

A: She was born Catherine O'Flaherty.

Q: Was Kate Chopin's husband related, however distantly, to Frédéric Chopin the composer?

A: Apparently not. Kate Chopin has had three biographers, but none of them has discovered a family connection, and a French scholar in Paris has not found a link.

Q: Was Kate Chopin’s work forgotten until her literary revival in the 1970s?

A: With a few exceptions here and there, The Awakening was. But some of Chopin's short stories were not forgotten. Several of those stories appeared in anthologies from the 1920s on, and several important scholars were writing about her fiction for decades before it caught fire with the appearance of her Complete Works in 1969 (continue)

Awakenings: The Story of the Kate Chopin Revival, edited by Bernard Koloski. Recollections and critical insights by Robert D. Arner, Thomas Bonner, Jr., Lynda S. Boren, Anna Shannon Elfenbein, Barbara C. Ewell, Bernard Koloski, Susan Lohafer, Mary E. Papke, Barbara H. Solomon, Marlene Springer, Helen Taylor, and Emily Toth. 232 pages. Louisiana State University Press paperback, 2012, $18.95 (hardcover edition, 2009, $35). You can hear a podcast about Kate Chopin and this book. (The podcast has a second part.)

Characters and Plots in the Fiction of Kate Chopin, by Robert L. Gale. 191 pages. McFarland, 2009. $75.

Kate Chopin in the Twenty-first Century: New Critical Essays, edited by Heather Ostman. Essays by Donna Kornhaber and David Kornhaber, Jane F. Thraikill, Heidi Johnsen, Garnet Ayers Batinovich, Lisa A. Kirby, Meredith Frederich, Rebecca Nisetich, and Li-Wen Chang. 162 pages. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008. $44.99.

The Cambridge Companion to Kate Chopin, edited by Janet Beer. Essays by Emily Toth, Donna Campbell, Pamela Knights, Susan Castillo, Katherine Joslin, Ann Heilmann, Michael Worton, Elizabeth Nolan, Avril Horner, Helen Taylor, and Bernard Koloski. 184 pages. Cambridge University Press, 2008. $29.99.

Kate Chopin's The Awakening, edited by Harold Bloom. Essays by Dorothy Dix, Percival Pollard, Cyrille Arnavon, Kenneth Eble, Stanley Kauffmann, Cynthia Griffin Wolff, Lawrence Thornton, Sandra M. Gilbert, Rosemary F. Franklin, Barbara H. Solomon, Elizabeth Ammons, Margo Culley, Kathryn Lee Seidel, Margit Stange, and Emily Toth. 96 pages. Chelsea House, 2008. $30.

At Fault is on line

Kate Chopin's early novel At Fault is available on line at the Project Gutenberg site. You can download it or you can read it on line. It's searchable by word or phrase or chapter number, and it's an accurate, trustworthy text.

Éditions Interférences in Paris published in 2011 a new translation of Kate Chopin short stories. The volume is titled Le Sorcier de Gettysburg, and the translations were done by Marie-Anne de Kisch.

The foreword to the volume notes that "at the end of the nineteenth century, in a Louisiana still traumatized by the Civil War, [Kate Chopin] described with subtlety and even audacity the contradictions and ambiguities of the female soul. In Le Sorcier de Gettysburg, as in Une Nuit en Acadie, there is another aspect of her work on display. Although women maintain an important place in the stories, the principal characters this time are Louisiana and its inhabitants."

The book includes translations of eighteen Chopin stories, arranged in this order: "The Maid of Saint Phillippe," "A Wizard from Gettysburg," "Ma'ame Pélagie," "The Locket," "The Return of Alcibiade," "Mrs. Mobry's Reason," "A Visit to Avoyelles," "The Lilies," "Mamouche," "Polydore," "Dead Men's Shoes," "Loka," "The Bênitous' Slave," "Old Aunt Peggy," "Nég Créol," "Vagabonds," "Ripe Figs," and "A Reflection."

Éditions Interférences has also published translations of works by Ambrose Bierce, Louisa May Alcott, Dorothy Scarborough, and Charles Dickens.

Cartoonist Gabrielle Bell's newest book is called Cecil and Jordan in New York (Drawn and Quarterly, 2009). It's a collection of short works.

Here is the first page of a story called "One Afternoon":

The New York Times says Cecil and Jordan in New York "is narrated by a young woman who's just moved to the city with her filmmaker boyfriend; it's a clear-cut tale of impecunious 20-something artists until halfway through, when the narrator abruptly transforms herself into a chair, gets taken home by someone who finds her on the sidewalk and decides that her old life won’t miss her. The engine of these mercilessly observed stories is squirminess: emotional awkwardness so intense that it can erupt into magic or just knot itself into scars."

Kate Chopin's famous short story "Désirée's Baby" appeared in Vogue in January 1893. It was the earliest of nineteen Kate Chopin stories that the magazine published.

Vogue's first issue had come out just a few weeks before, in December 1892. It cost ten cents (about $2.30 in 2011 American dollars). The cover:

Chopin's "The Story of an Hour," "A Respectable Woman," and "A Pair of Silk Stockings" also appeared in Vogue.

Kate Chopin's picture appeared in the December, 1894, issue. Emily Toth explains in Unveiling Kate Chopin that Chopin is presented "in an etherial contemplative pose, wearing a small black headdress. Vogue's caption praised both her brains and beauty:

'MRS. KATE CHOPIN—A beautiful woman, whose portrait fails to convey a tithe of the charm of her expressively lovely face, has been an honored contributor to Vogue almost from its first number. . . . Mrs. Chopin is daring in her choice of themes, but exquisitely refined in the treatment of them, and her literary style is a model of terse and finished diction.'"

In December, 2011, Vogue announced that all of its issues (from 1892 on) are available online.

You can read questions and answers about Kate Chopin and her work, and you can email us your questions.

About the Kate Chopin International Society

Become a member of the Kate Chopin International Society

About this website

How to cite information on this website

Contact us