What I’m Blogging

It’s the birthday of the novelist Kate Chopin, born Katherine O’Flaherty in St. Louis, Missouri (1851). She married a wealthy owner of a cotton business and lived with him in New Orleans. But after her husband suddenly died of a fever, a rumor got out that she’d been having an affair with a married neighbor. The town turned against her and she eventually moved back to St. Louis to live with her mother.

…in less than ten years she produced three novels and more than a hundred short stories…

It was there that Chopin first began to write. She had six children to take care of, so she wrote on a lapboard in the living room while her children played around her. Because she was so busy, she tried to write as quickly as she could. In less than ten years she produced three novels and more than a hundred short stories.

Chopin’s early work was melodramatic and sentimental, but everything changed when she first read the French writer Guy de Maupassant. She wrote, “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 … [who wrote] without the plots, the old fashioned mechanism and stage trapping that in a vague, unthinking way I had fancied were essential to the art of story making.”

Chopin began to write more explicitly about dissatisfied wives and marital infidelity. Then she published The Awakening (1899) about a woman who leaves her husband and her children to have an affair and become an artist and then eventually commits suicide by swimming out to sea. It was one of the first novels ever written by a woman about a woman committing adultery and it was almost universally attacked by critics. The St. Louis literary community refused to review the novel at all and libraries and bookstores in Chopin’s hometown wouldn’t stock the book. Chopin was unable to publish her next book of short stories and she died five years later, in 1904.

Today, The Awakening is considered one of greatest novels of 19th-century American literature.