Chopin in 1894

Born Katherine O'Flaherty

February 8, 1850
St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.
Died August 22, 1904 (aged 54)
St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.
Occupation Novelist, short story writer
Genre Realistic fiction
Notable works The Awakening

Kate Chopin, born Katherine O'Flaherty (February 8, 1850 – August 22, 1904), was a U.S. author of short
stories and novels based in Louisiana. She is now considered by some scholars [1] to have been a
forerunner of American 20th-century feminist authors of Southern or Catholic background, such
as Zelda Fitzgerald.

Of maternal French and paternal Irish descent, Katherine O' Flaherty was born in St. Louis, Missouri. She
married and moved with her husband to New Orleans. They later lived in the country in Cloutierville,
Louisiana. From 1892 to 1895, Chopin wrote short stories for both children and adults that were
published in such national magazines as Atlantic Monthly, Vogue, The Century Magazine, and The
Youth's Companion. Her stories aroused controversy because of her subjects and her approach; they
were condemned as immoral by some critics.

Her major works were two short story collections: Bayou Folk (1894) and A Night in Acadie (1897). Her
important short stories included "Désirée’s Baby" (1893), a tale
of miscegenation in antebellum Louisiana, "The Story of an Hour" (1894), and "The Storm"(1898). "The
Storm" is a sequel to "The 'Cadian Ball," which appeared in her first collection of short stories, Bayou
Folk.

Chopin also wrote two novels: At Fault (1890) and The Awakening (1899), which are set in New
Orleans and Grand Isle, respectively. The characters in her stories are usually residents of Louisiana.
Many of her works are set in Natchitoches in north central Louisiana, a region where she lived.

Within a decade of her death, Chopin was widely recognized as one of the leading writers of her time. In
1915, Fred Lewis Pattee wrote, "some of [Chopin's] work is equal to the best that has been produced in
France or even in America. [She displayed] what may be described as a native aptitude for narration
amounting almost to genius."
Life

Chopin and her children in New Orleans, 1877

Chopin was born Katherine O'Flaherty in St. Louis, Missouri. Her father, Thomas O'Flaherty, was a
successful businessman who had immigrated to the United States from Galway, Ireland. Her mother,
Eliza Faris, was his second wife and a well-connected member of the ethnic French community in St.
Louis; she was the daughter of Athénaïse Charleville, who was of French Canadian descent. Some of
Chopin's ancestors were among the first European (French) inhabitants of Dauphin Island, Alabama.

Kate was the third of five children, but her sisters died in infancy and her half-brothers (from her father's
first marriage) died in their early twenties. They were reared Roman Catholic, in the French and Irish
traditions. After her father's death in 1855, Chopin developed a close relationship with her mother,
maternal grandmother, and great-grandmother. She also became an avid reader of fairy tales, poetry,
and religious allegories, as well as classic and contemporary novels. She graduated from Sacred Heart
Convent in St. Louis in 1868.

Chopin house in Cloutierville

In St. Louis, Missouri, on 8 June 1870, she married Oscar Chopin and settled with him in his home town
of New Orleans, an important port. Chopin had six children between 1871 and 1879: in order of birth,
Jean Baptiste, Oscar Charles, George Francis, Frederick, Felix Andrew, and Lélia (baptized Marie Laïza). In
1879, Oscar Chopin's cotton brokerage failed.

The family left the city and moved to Cloutierville in south Natchitoches Parish to manage several
small plantations and a general store. They became active in the community, and Chopin absorbed
much material for her future writing, especially regarding the culture of the Creoles of color of the area.

When Oscar Chopin died in 1882, he left Kate with $42,000 in debt (approximately $420,000 in 2009
money). According to Emily Toth, "for a while the widow Kate ran his [Oscar's] business and flirted
outrageously with local men; (she even engaged in a relationship with a married farmer)." Although
Chopin worked to make her late husband's plantation and general store succeed, two years later she
sold her Louisiana business.

Her mother had implored her to move back to St. Louis, and Chopin did, aided by her mother's
assistance with finances. Her children gradually settled into life in the bustling city of St. Louis. The
following year, Chopin's mother died.

Chopin struggled with depression after the losses in a short time of both her husband and her mother.
Her obstetrician and family friend, Dr. Frederick Kolbenheyer, suggested that she start writing, believing
that it could be a source of therapeutic healing for her. He understood also that writing could be a focus
for her extraordinary energy, as well as a source of income.
By the early 1890s, Kate Chopin began writing short stories, articles, and translations which were
published in periodicals, including the St. Louis Post-Dispatch newspaper. She was quite successful and
placed many of her publications in literary magazines. At the time, she was considered only as a
regional local color writer, as this was a period of considerable publishing of folk tales, works in dialect,
and other elements of Southern folk life. Chopin's strong literary qualities were overlooked.

In 1899, her second novel, The Awakening, was published. It generated a significant amount of negative
press because its characters, especially the women, behaved in ways that conflicted with current
standards of acceptable ladylike behavior. People considered offensive Chopin's treatment of female
sexuality, her questions about the virtues of motherhood, and showing occasions of marital infidelity. At
the same time, some newspaper critics reviewed it favorably.

This, her best-known work, is the story of a woman trapped in the confines of an oppressive society. It
was out of print for several decades, as literary tastes changed. Rediscovered in the 1970s, when there
was a wave of new studies and appreciation of women's writings, the novel has since been reprinted
and is widely available. It has been critically acclaimed for its writing quality and importance as an
early feminist work of the South.

Critics suggest that such works as The Awakening, were too far ahead of their time and therefore not
socially embraced. After almost 12 years of publishing and shattered by the lack of acceptance, Chopin,
deeply discouraged by the criticism, turned to short story writing.[11] In 1900, she wrote "The
Gentleman from New Orleans." That same year she was listed in the first edition of Marquis Who's
Who. However, she never made much money from her writing, and had to depend on her investments
in Louisiana and St. Louis (aided by her inheritance from her mother) to support her.

Kate Chopin's grave in Calvary Cemetery, St. Louis, Missouri

While visiting the St. Louis World's Fair on August 20, 1904, Chopin suffered a brain hemorrhage. She
died two days later, at the age of 54. She was interred in Calvary Cemetery in St. Louis.

Literary themes

Kate Chopin lived in a variety of locations, based on different economies and societies. These were
sources of insights and observations from which she analyzed and expressed her ideas about late 19th-
century Southern American society. She was brought up by women who were primarily ethnic French.
Living in areas influenced by the Louisiana Creole and Cajun cultures after she joined her husband in
Louisiana, she based many of her stories and sketches in her life in Louisiana. They expressed her
unusual portrayals (for the time) of women as individuals with separate wants and needs.[14]

Chopin's writing style was influenced by her admiration of the contemporary French writer Guy de
Maupassant, known for his short stories:
...I read his stories and marveled at them. Here was life, not fiction; for where were the plots, the old
fashioned mechanism and stage trapping that in a vague, unthinkable way I had fancied were essential
to the art of story making. Here was a man who had escaped from tradition and authority, who had
entered into himself and looked out upon life through his own being and with his own eyes; and who, in
a direct and simple way, told us what he saw...

Chopin went beyond Maupassant's technique and style to give her writing its own flavor. She had an
ability to perceive life and creatively express it. She concentrated on women's lives and their continual
struggles to create an identity of their own within the Southern society of the late nineteenth century.
For instance, in "The Story of an Hour," Mrs. Mallard allows herself time to reflect after learning of her
husband's death. Instead of dreading the lonely years ahead, she stumbles upon another realization
altogether.

"She knew that she would weep again when she saw the kind, tender hands folded in death; the face
that had never looked save with love upon her, fixed and gray and dead. But she saw beyond that bitter
moment a long procession of years to come that would belong to her absolutely. And she opened and
spread her arms out to them in welcome."

Not many writers during the mid- to late 19th century were bold enough to address subjects that Chopin
took on. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, of Emory University, wrote that "Kate was neither a feminist nor a
suffragist, she said so. She was nonetheless a woman who took women extremely seriously. She never
doubted women's ability to be strong."[16] Kate Chopin's sympathies lay with the individual in the
context of his and her personal life and society.

Through her stories, Kate Chopin wrote a kind of autobiography and described her societies; she had
grown up in a time when her surroundings included the abolitionist movements before the American
Civil War, and their influence on freedmeneducation and rights afterward, as well as the emergence of
feminism. Her ideas and descriptions were not reporting, but her stories expressed the reality of her
world.

Chopin took strong interest in her surroundings and wrote about many of her observations. Jane Le
Marquand assesses Chopin's writings as a new feminist voice, while other intellectuals recognize it as
the voice of an individual who happens to be a woman. Marquand writes, "Chopin undermines
patriarchy by endowing the Other, the woman, with an individual identity and a sense of self, a sense of
self to which the letters she leaves behind give voice. The 'official' version of her life, that constructed by
the men around her, is challenged and overthrown by the woman of the story."

Chopin appeared to express her belief in the strength of women. Marquand draws from theories about
creative nonfiction in terms of her work. In order for a story to be autobiographical, or even
biographical, Marquand writes, there has to be a nonfictional element, but more often than not the
author exaggerates the truth to spark and hold interest for the readers. Kate Chopin might have been
surprised to know her work has been characterized as feminist in the late 20th and early 21st centuries,
just as she had been in her own time to have it described as immoral. Critics tend to regard writers as
individuals with larger points of view addressed to factions in society.
The short story of "Désirée's Baby" focuses on Kate Chopin's experience with miscegenation and
communities of the Creolesof color in Louisiana. She came of age when slavery was institutionalized in
St. Louis and the South. In Louisiana, there had been communities established of free people of color,
especially in New Orleans, where formal arrangements were made between white men and free women
of color or enslaved women for plaçage, a kind of common-law marriage. There and in the country, she
lived with a society based on the history of slavery and the continuation of plantation life, to a great
extent. Mixed-race people (also known as mulattos) were numerous in New Orleans and the South. This
story addresses the racism of 19th century America; persons who were visibly European-American could
be threatened by the revelation of also having African ancestry. Chopin was not afraid to address such
issues, which were often suppressed and intentionally ignored. Her character Armand tries to deny this
reality, when he refuses to believe that he is of black descent, as it threatens his ideas about himself and
his status in life. R. R. Foy believed that Chopin's story reached the level of great fiction, in which the
only true subject is "human existence in its subtle, complex, true meaning, stripped of the view with
which ethical and conventional standards have draped it".

"Desiree's Baby" was first published in an 1893 issue of Vogue magazine, alongside another of Kate
Chopin's short stories, "A Visit to Avoyelles", under the heading "Character Studies: The Father of
Desiree's Baby - The Lover of Mentine." "A Visit to Avoyelles" typifies the local color writing that Chopin
was known for, and is one of her stories that shows a couple in a completely fulfilled marriage. While
Doudouce is hoping otherwise, he sees ample evidence that Mentine and Jules' marriage is a happy and
fulfilling one, despite the poverty-stricken circumstances that they live in. In contrast, in "Desiree's
Baby", which is much more controversial, due to the topic of miscegenation, portrays a marriage in
trouble. The other contrasts to "A Visit to Avoyelles" are very clear, although some are more subtle than
others. Unlike Mentine and Jules, Armand and Desiree are rich and own slaves and a plantation.
Mentine and Jules' marriage has weathered many hard times, while Armand and Desiree's falls apart at
the first sign of trouble. Kate Chopin was very talented at showing various sides of marriages and local
people and their lives, making her writing very broad and sweeping in topic, even as she had many
common themes in her work.

One of Kate Chopin’s last published short stories (“Polly”) appeared in this issue of the Youth’s
Companion, a popular children’s and family magazine, in 1902.

Today all of Kate Chopin’s stories are in print and are easily available in published anthologies. Many of
them are also available online. Among her most famous stories are several that have pages devoted to
them on this site. The five most popular stories are listed here in the order they are most often
discussed by students, teachers, scholars, critics, and other readers:
“The Story of an Hour”
“The Storm”
“Désirée’s Baby”
“A Pair of Silk Stockings”
“A Respectable Woman”

These stories are also popular among scholars, critics, students, and other readers:

“Athénaïse”
“A No-Account Creole”
“A Point at Issue!”
“A Vocation and a Voice”
“At the ‘Cadian Ball”
“Beyond the Bayou”
“Charlie”
“Fedora”
“Her Letters”
“Lilacs”
“Madame Célestin’s Divorce”
“Ozème’s Holiday”
“Regret”
“Ripe Figs”
“The Kiss”
“The Locket”

Kate Chopin’s children’s stories are becoming popular among scholars, critics, students, and other
readers:

These links will take you to more information about Kate Chopin’s short stories.:

Reading Kate Chopin’s short stories online and in print

Characters and settings in the short stories
Themes
When the stories were written and published
Films based on the stories
Questions and answers
Two recent translations of Chopin stories
Accurate texts of the stories
Articles and book chapters about specific Chopin short stories
Articles and book chapters about Chopin’s subjects and themes
Selected books that discuss Kate Chopin’s short stories

Reading Kate Chopin’s short stories online and in print

The stories in Chopin’s anthologies, Bayou Folk and A Night in Acadie, along with some other stories are
available on Donna Campbell’s site at Washington State University. 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
America Kate Chopin volume. Kate Chopin’s Private Papers publishes a few stories that scholars
discovered in recent years. The Penguin Classics edition of Bayou Folk and A Night in Acadieincludes the
stories Chopin published in those collections, and the Penguin Classics edition of A Vocation and a
Voice includes stories which, according to her early biographer, Daniel Rankin, 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 America 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 Kate Chopin’s short stories

Most of Kate Chopin’s short 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 Kate Chopin’s short stories

You can read about finding themes in Kate Chopin’s stories and novels on the Themes page of this site,
and on the page for a specific story you can see what some readers consider the story’s theme or
principal subject.

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,
the Youth’s Companion, the Century, and the Atlantic Monthly. 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.
You can find out when Kate Chopin wrote each of her short stories and when and where each was first
published.

Films based on Kate Chopin’s short stories

IMDb.com, the Internet Movie Database, includes a filmography of works based on Kate Chopin’s
fiction. The listing includes at least nine films–long and short–made between 1956 and 2014.

Questions and answers about Kate Chopin’s short 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?

A: Yes. Her mother’s family was of French stock, and Kate grew up bilingual.

Q: What about the Creole or other dialectal expressions? I love Kate Chopin, but at places in the short
stories, I really struggle with understanding what her characters are saying. How do I deal with that?

A: You might try reading the stories aloud–or you might find someone who can read them aloud with
feeling. Chopin is capturing what her characters sound like as they speak, so it may be helpful to hear
the story, rather than read it.

For example, here’s a passage from an early Chopin story in which a caretaker at a plantation is talking
to a visitor. The caretaker says that he himself would not be complaining about how run down the place
has become:

“If it would been me myse’f, I would nevair grumb’. W’en a chimbly breck, I take one, two de boys; we
patch ‘im up bes’ we know how. We keep on men’ de fence’, firs’ one place, anudder. . . .”

If you could hear that read aloud, you might understand better. In today’s standard English, the
character would be saying something like:

“If it would [have] been me myself, I would never grumble. When a chimney breaks, I take one or two
[of] the boys; we patch it up [the] best we know how. We keep on mending the fences, first [at] one
place [and then at] another. . . .”
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 an anthology within five years after her death, others
were reprinted over the years, and important scholars were writing about her fiction for decades before
it caught fire with the appearance of her Complete Works in 1969.

Q: Was Kate Chopin involved in the women’s suffrage movement, in the progressive movements for
educational reform, health care reform, or sanitation improvement? Was she involved in any other
historically significant happenings of her time?

A: Kate Chopin was an artist, a writer of fiction, and like many artists–in the nineteenth century and
today–she considered that her primary responsibility to people was showing them the truth about life as
she understood it.

So if you’re asking if Kate Chopin was involved in social activism as political scientists today would
understand that term, the answer is no. She was not a social reformer. Her goal was not to change the
world but to describe it accurately, to show people the truth about the lives of women and men in the
nineteenth-century America she knew.

If, however, you’re asking if Chopin was involved in “historically significant happenings” as many artists
would understand those words, then the answer is yes. She was among the first American authors to
write truthfully about women’s hidden lives, about women’s sexuality, and about some of the
complexities and contradictions in women’s relationships with their husbands.

As the critic Per Seyersted phrases it, Kate Chopin “broke new ground in American literature. She was
the first woman writer in her country to accept passion as a legitimate subject for serious, outspoken
fiction. Revolting against tradition and authority; with a daring which we can hardy fathom today; with
an uncompromising honesty and no trace of sensationalism, she undertook to give the unsparing truth
about woman’s submerged life. She was something of a pioneer in the amoral treatment of sexuality, of
divorce, and of woman’s urge for an existential authenticity. She is in many respects a modern writer,
particularly in her awareness of the complexities of truth and the complications of freedom.”

Artists like Kate Chopin see the truth and help others to see it. Once people are able to recognize the
truth, then they can create social reform movements and set out to correct wrongs and injustices.

Q: So does that mean that what I read on a blog is true, that Kate Chopin “was an integral part of the
evolution of feminism, providing early 20th century readers with feminist literature that is still highly
respected and studied today”?

A: No, it’s almost certainly not true, simply because, from everything we can tell, little of what many
readers today consider Chopin’s feminist literature was read in the early years of the twentieth century–
The Awakening, for example, or “The Story of an Hour,” or, certainly, “The Storm.” You might argue that
after the 1960s or 1970s Chopin became “an integral part of the evolution of feminism,” but she
probably had little or no influence on early 20th-century feminist readers.
Q: I find it difficult to find the right terms for describing Kate Chopin’s style, which I think has some
romantic elements but also some realistic ones. In what ways was Chopin influenced by other writers,
like Maupassant?

A: Chopin read widely and drew from many movements in nineteenth-century literature—romanticism
(she had read Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson), realism (she reviewed a book by Hamlin
Garland) and local color (she places her characters in a geographical and historical moment and details
their sometimes exotic speech patterns and cultural dispositions). She mentions German philosopher
and playwright Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in her work as well as other European writers from
Aeschylus to Ibsen. She was deeply influenced by French writers Guy de Maupassant (she loved his
economy of detail) and Émile Zola (she was impressed by his determination to tell the truth), both of
whom she read in their original French. She understood that Maupassant and Zola rejected sentimental
fiction, but she was drawn to the work of the French writer George Sand who at times used sentimental
elements to describe a woman trying to balance the well-being of others with her own freedom and
integrity.

Q: I understand some critics fault Kate Chopin for her attitudes toward race. Where could I find
discussions of that subject?

A: There’s been a good deal written about Chopin and race. You might start by reading articles by Anna
Shannon Elfenbein, Helen Taylor, and Elizabeth Ammons in the Norton Critical Edition of The
Awakening, and you might look at Bonnie James Shaker’s Coloring Locals. For a defense of Chopin you
might start by checking Emily Toth’s Kate Chopin and Bernard Koloski’s Kate Chopin: A Study of the
Short Fiction, and on line you could read Elizabeth Fox-Genovese’s comments on the Kate Chopin: A Re-
Awakening site. You can find information about these and other publications about Chopin and race at
the bottom of the Awakening page, as well as on pages devoted to individual stories, like “Désirée’s
Baby.”

Q: How can I find out when Kate Choopin wrote her stories and where those works were first published?

A: Composition dates and publication dates for Chopin’s works appear on pages 1003 to 1032 of The
Complete Works of Kate Chopin, edited by Per Seyersted (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,
1969, 2006).

Q: I know that Chopin dealt with a lot of deaths to loved ones growing up. Do many of her writings
involve the death of the characters? Are these writings available?

A: In addition to famous stories like “The Story of an Hour” and “Désirée’s Baby” and the novels At
Fault and The Awakening, here are fifteen short stories in which the subject of death comes up (listed in
order of composition):

“For Marse Chouchoute”

“The Maid of Saint Phillippe”
“Doctor Chevalier’s Lie”
“The Return of Alcibiade”
“La Belle Zoraïde”
“At Chênière Caminada”
“A Sentimental Soul”
“Her Letters”
“Odalie Misses Mass”
“Dead Men’s Shoes”
“Madame Martel’s Christmas Eve”
“Nég Créol”
“Suzette”
“The Locket”
“The Godmother”

Yes, all of Kate Chopin’s works are available in the books listed near the bottom of most pages on this
site; both her novels and many of her stories are posted on the web.

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

A 2011 Brazilian Translation of Kate Chopin Short Stories

We received this message from Beatriz Viégas-Faria, a professor at the Universidade Federal de Pelotas
in Brazil:
“I’m writing to let you know about a new book with translations of twelve of Kate Chopin’s short stories
that launched on June 20, 2011, in Porto Alegre, Brazil.

“Each of the twelve short stories (in the original English and in Brazilian Portuguese) is followed by two
essays–one from a PhD in literature and one from a medical professional (psychiatrists and/or
psychoanalysts and one specialist in public health, a nationally renowned fiction writer).

“Other features of the book: one essay presents the translations and the translation process, another
presents the literary importance of the short stories, and another presents the importance of Kate
Chopin as an example of how literature can help qualify and make more human the relation between a
medical doctor and a patient. There is also a text written by two of the translators on Kate Chopin’s life
and work.”

“Launching night in Porto Alegre was a big success,” Beatriz Viégas-Faria adds, “with more people than
seats for the dramatic reading of ‘A Pair of Silk Stockings’ by actress/professor Mirna Spritzer (the
Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul). And then we signed books until 10 PM, when the book store
closed.

“That was June 20, and then on Sept. 16, in São Paulo, we had another session of book signing, and
actress Cris Nicolotti (stage and TV actor from São Paulo) was in charge of the dramatic reading of that
same story. We had a good crowd attending, so we again had people lining up to have their books
signed.

“On Oct. 27, in Caxias do Sul (state of Rio Grande do Sul, again), we’ll have yet another book signing
session, with dramatic reading by a local actor. And then on Nov. 10, the book signing is scheduled to
take place in the traditional and nationally renowned (57-year-old) Book Fair of Porto Alegre. This fair is
absolutely packed with people for its 15 days of duration, and every year it opens on the last Friday of
October. Our famous Feira do Livro, with its typical outdoor stands under the Spring blossoms, rain or
shine, opened every year, even during the times of censorship during the political regime of military
dictatorship in our country.”

A 2011 French Translation of Kate Chopin Short Stories–With a Different Emphasis

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.

For students and scholars

Accurate texts of Kate Chopin’s short 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 Stories. Edited by Sandra Gilbert. New York: Library of America, 2002.

Articles and book chapters 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.

Bonner, Jr., Thomas. “New Orleans and Its Writers: Burdens of Place.” Mississippi Quarterly 63. 1–2
(2010): 95-209. Discusses “Desiree’s Baby” and “A Matter of Prejudice.”

Mayer, Gary H. “A Matter of Behavior: A Semantic Analysis of Five Kate Chopin Stories.” ETC.: A Review
of General Semantics 67.1 (2010): 94-104. Discusses “The Story of an Hour,” “Désirée’s Baby,” “Beyond
the Bayou,” “Ma’ame Pélagie,” and “A Matter of Prejudice.”

Hebert-Leiter, Maria. “The Awakening Awakened.” In Becoming Cajun, Becoming American: The Acadian
in American Literature from Longfellow to James Lee Burke, 57–78. Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2009.
Discusses “At the ‘Cadian Ball,” “A Gentleman of Bayou Teche,” “Ozème’s Holiday,” “A Rude
Awakening,” “In Sabine,” and “The Storm.”

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.

Articles and book chapters 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 WeltyLanham, 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.

Lohafer, Susan, and Jo Ellyn Clarey, eds. Short Story Theory at a Crossroads. Baton Rouge: Louisiana
State UP, 1989.

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.