Kate Chopin Short Stories

"There would be no one to live for her during those coming years; she would live for herself. There would be no powerful will bending hers in that blind persistence with which men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow-creature." From "The Story of an Hour," one of Kate Chopin's best-known short stories.

When Kate Chopin's short stories were written and published

Kate Chopin composed her hundred or so stories between 1889 and her death in 1904. Most were published in her lifetime in national and regional magazines and newspapers, including Vogue, Youth's Companion, the Century, the Atlantic Monthly, and others. A few of the stories were syndicated nationally. Twenty-three of them were included in her collection, Bayou Folk, published by Houghton Mifflin in Boston in 1894, and twenty-one others in A Night in Acadie, published by Way and Williams in Chicago in 1897. A third collection, to have been titled A Vocation and a Voice, was canceled by Chopin's publisher without explanation and did not appear as a separate volume until 1991.

Today all of Kate Chopin's stories are in print and are easily available in published anthologies. Among her most famous stories—those most often read and discussed in classrooms and book clubs—are several that have pages devoted to them on this site: "The Storm," "At the 'Cadian Ball," "The Story of an Hour," "Désirée's Baby," "A Pair of Silk Stockings," "A Respectable Woman," "Athénaïse," "Beyond the Bayou," "A No-Account Creole," "Lilacs," "Fedora," and "Madame Célestin's Divorce."

Kate Chopin's stories on line and in print

A few of the stories are included with The Awakening and Chopin's early novel At Fault on the Project Gutenberg site. The stories in Chopin's anthologies, Bayou Folk and A Night in Acadie, along with some other stories are available here. Some of Kate Chopin's stories are not yet online. If you're citing a passage of an online text for research purposes, you should check your citation against one of the accurate texts listed below.

In print you can find almost all the stories in The Complete Works of Kate Chopin and in the Library of American Literature Kate Chopin volume. Kate Chopin's Private Papers publishes a few that scholars discovered in recent years. The Penguin Classics edition of Bayou Folk and A Night in Acadie includes the stories Chopin published in those anthologies, and the Penguin Classics edition of A Vocation and a Voice includes stories which apparently Chopin had hoped to publish in a third collection. Some stories are available in paperback and hardcover editions of The Awakening and some in countless general short story anthologies and high school and college textbooks.

For publication information about these books, see the section "For students and scholars" near the bottom of this page.

You can find on the web page for the Library of American Literature Kate Chopin volume a list of which stories Chopin included in Bayou Folk and a Night in Acadie and which she did not included in those anthologies. The LOA web page also explains the difficulty in understanding which stories Chopin had hoped to include in A Vocation and a Voice.

Characters, time, and place in the stories

Most of the stories are set in the late nineteenth century in Louisiana, often rural Louisiana. Most of the characters, like most of the people living in Louisiana at the time, are Creoles, Acadians, "Americans" (as the Creoles and Acadians call outsiders), African Americans, Native Americans, and people of mixed race. Except for some of the Creoles, most of the characters are terribly poor, because the area has yet to recover from the devastation of the Civil War.

Themes in the stories

You can read about finding themes in Kate Chopin's stories and novels on the Themes page of this site.

Questions and answers about the stories

Q: Why are there so many French expressions in some of Chopin's stories? If I don't understand French, how do I know what those expressions mean?

A: Many of the characters in Chopin's stories speak French, Spanish, Creole, or all three, in addition to English. Many people with French and Spanish roots live in Louisiana, and some of them speak more than one language. Like Mark Twain and other writers of her time, Chopin was determined to be accurate in the way she recorded the speech of the people she focused on in her work. Some editions of the short stories (like the Penguin Classics editions of Bayou Folk and A Night in Acadie and A Vocation and a Voice) include translations of French expressions, and Chopin usually subtly glosses such expressions in the text. Missing the meaning of a French expression is not likely to lead to a mistake in understanding a story.

Q: Did Kate Chopin herself speak French as well as English?

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.

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

For students and scholars

Accurate texts of the stories

The Complete Works of Kate Chopin. Edited by Per Seyersted. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969, 2006.

Kate Chopin’s Private Papers. Edited by Emily Toth, Per Seyersted, and Cheyenne Bonnell. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998.

Bayou Folk and A Night in Acadie. Edited by Bernard Koloski. New York: Penguin, 1999.

A Vocation and a Voice. Edited by Emily Toth. New York: Penguin, 1991.

Kate Chopin: Complete Novels and Short Stories. Edited by Sandra Gilbert. New York: Library of American Literature, 2002.

Recent publications about specific Kate Chopin short stories (you can find recent publications about some of Kate Chopin's more widely discussed stories by clicking on a story at the top left of this page)

Frederich, Meredith. "Extinguished Humanity: Fire in Kate Chopin's 'The Godmother'." Kate Chopin in the Twenty-First Century: New Critical Essays. 105-118. Newcastle upon Tyne, England: Cambridge Scholars, 2008.

Johnsen, Heidi. "Kate Chopin in Vogue: Establishing a Textual Context for A Vocation and a Voice." Kate Chopin in the Twenty-First Century: New Critical Essays. 53-69. Newcastle upon Tyne, England: Cambridge Scholars, 2008.

Kornhaber, Donna, and David Kornhaber.. "Stage and Status: Theatre and Class in the Short Fiction of Kate Chopin." Kate Chopin in the Twenty-First Century: New Critical Essays. 15-32. Newcastle upon Tyne, England: Cambridge Scholars, 2008.

Liu, Hongwei. "Lun li huan jing yu xiao shuo Jue xing de ju jue yu jie shou." Foreign Literature Studies/Wai Guo Wen Xue Yan Jiu 30.6 (Dec. 2008): 71-75.

Edwards, Bradley C. "Allusion and the Evolution of Artistry in Kate Chopin's 'A Wizard from Gettysburg' and 'After the Winter'." American Literary Realism 39.2 (Winter 2007): 138-149.

Tritt, Michael. "Kate Chopin's 'Cavanelle' and The American Jewess: An Impressive Synergy." Mississippi Quarterly: The Journal of Southern Cultures 59.3-4 (2006 Summer-2006 Fall 2006): 543-557.

Recent publications about subjects and themes in Kate Chopin's short stories

Batinovich, Garnet Ayers. "Storming the Cathedral: The Antireligious Subtext in Kate Chopin's Works." Kate Chopin in the Twenty-First Century: New Critical Essays. 73-90. Newcastle upon Tyne, England: Cambridge Scholars, 2008.

Castillo, Susan. "'Race' and Ethnicity in Kate Chopin's Fiction." The Cambridge Companion to Kate Chopin. 59-72. Cambridge, England: Cambridge UP, 2008.

Horner, Avril. "Kate Chopin, Choice and Modernism." The Cambridge Companion to Kate Chopin. 132-146. Cambridge, England: Cambridge UP, 2008.

Joslin, Katherine. "Kate Chopin on Fashion in a Darwinian World." The Cambridge Companion to Kate Chopin. 73-86. Cambridge, England: Cambridge UP, 2008.

Knights, Pamela. "Kate Chopin and the Subject of Childhood." The Cambridge Companion to Kate Chopin. 44-58. Cambridge, England: Cambridge UP, 2008.

Taylor, Helen. "'The Perfume of the Past': Kate Chopin and Post-Colonial New Orleans." The Cambridge Companion to Kate Chopin. 147-160. Cambridge, England: Cambridge UP, 2008.

Thrailkill, Jane F. "Chopin's Lyrical Anodyne for the Modern Soul." Kate Chopin in the Twenty-First Century: New Critical Essays. 33-52. Newcastle upon Tyne, England: Cambridge Scholars, 2008.

Toth, Emily. "What We Do and Don't Know About Kate Chopin's Life." The Cambridge Companion to Kate Chopin. 13-26. Cambridge, England: Cambridge UP, 2008.

Worton, Michael. "Reading Kate Chopin Through Contemporary French Feminist Theory." The Cambridge Companion to Kate Chopin. 105-117. Cambridge, England: Cambridge UP, 2008.

Zaugg, Brigitte. "Kate Chopin and Ellen Glasgow: Between Visibility and Oblivion." Résonances 10 (Oct. 2008): 179-202.

Koloski, Bernard. "Kate Chopin: The Critics, the Librarians, and the Scholars." Popular Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and the Literary Marketplace. 451-465. Newcastle upon Tyne, England: Cambridge Scholars, 2007.

Bloom, Lynn Z. "The Dinner Hours." CEA Critic: An Official Journal of the College English Association 69.1-2 (2006-2007 Fall-Winter 2006): 3-13.

Johnson, Steven K. "Uncanny Burials: Post-Civil War Memories in Chopin and Bierce." ABP Journal 2.1 (Fall 2006).

Pierse, Mary S. "Paris as 'Other': George Moore, Kate Chopin and French Literary Escape Routes." ABEI Journal: The Brazilian Journal of Irish Studies 8 (June 2006): 79-87.

Wasserstrom, Jeffrey N. "Searching for Emily Hahn on the Streets of St Louis." History Workshop Journal 61 (Spring 2006): 214-221.

Witherow, Jean. "Kate Chopin's Dialogic Engagement with W. D. Howells: 'What Cannot Love Do?'." Southern Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of the South 13.3-4 (2006 Fall-Winter 2006): 101-116.

Despain, Max and Thomas Bonner, Jr. "Shoulder to Wings: The Provenance of Winged Imagery from Kate Chopin's Juvenilia Through The Awakening." Xavier Review 25.2 (2005): 49-64.

Selected books that discuss Chopin's short stories

Koloski, Bernard, ed. Awakenings: The Story of the Kate Chopin Revival Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009.

Robert L. Gale. Characters and Plots in the Fiction of Kate Chopin Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2009.

Beer, Janet. The Cambridge Companion to Kate Chopin Cambridge, England: Cambridge UP, 2008.

Ostman, Heather. Kate Chopin in the Twenty-First Century: New Critical Essays Newcastle upon Tyne, England: Cambridge Scholars, 2008.

Arima, Hiroko. Beyond and Alone!: The Theme of Isolation in Selected Short Fiction of Kate Chopin, Katherine Anne Porter, and Eudora Welty Lanham, MD: UP of America, 2006.

Beer, Janet. Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton and Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Studies in Short Fiction New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

Stein, Allen F. Women and Autonomy in Kate Chopin's Short Fiction New York: Peter Lang, 2005.

Shaker, Bonnie James. Coloring Locals: Racial Formation in Kate Chopin's Youth's Companion Stories Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2003.

Walker, Nancy A. Kate Chopin: A Literary Life Basingstoke, England: Palgrave, 2001.

Koloski, Bernard. "Introduction" Bayou Folk and A Night in Acadie by Kate Chopin New York: Penguin, 1999.

Toth, Emily. Unveiling Kate Chopin Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1999.

Koloski, Bernard. Kate Chopin: A Study of the Short Fiction New York: Twayne, 1996.

Petry, Alice Hall (ed.), Critical Essays on Kate Chopin New York: G. K. Hall, 1996.

Elfenbein, Anna Shannon. Women on the Color Line: Evolving Stereotypes and the Writings of George Washington Cable, Grace King, Kate Chopin Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1994.

Boren, Lynda S. and Sara deSaussure Davis (eds.), Kate Chopin Reconsidered: Beyond the Bayou Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1992.

Perspectives on KateChopin: Proceedings from the Kate Chopin International Conference, April 6, 7, 8, 1989 Natchitoches, LA: Northwestern State UP, 1992.

Toth, Emily. "Introduction" A Vocation and a Voice New York: Penguin, 1991.

Papke, Mary E. Verging on the Abyss: The Social Fiction of Kate Chopin and Edith Wharton New York: Greenwood, 1990.

Toth, Emily. Kate Chopin. New York: Morrow, 1990.

Elfenbein , Anna Shannon. Women on the Color Line: Evolving Stereotypes and the Writings of George Washington Cable, Grace King, Kate Chopin Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1989.

Taylor, Helen. Gender, Race, and Region in the Writings of Grace King, Ruth McEnery Stuart, and Kate Chopin Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1989.

Bonner, Thomas Jr., The Kate Chopin Companion New York: Greenwood, 1988.

Bloom, Harold (ed.), Kate Chopin New York: Chelsea, 1987.

Ewell, Barbara C. Kate Chopin New York: Ungar, 1986.

Skaggs, Peggy. Kate Chopin Boston: Twayne, 1985.

Seyersted, Per. Kate Chopin: A Critical Biography Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1969.

Rankin, Daniel, Kate Chopin and Her Creole Stories Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1932.