Publication Order of Standalone Novels
| At Fault | 1890 |
| The Awakening | 1899 |
Publication Order of Short Story Collections
| Bayou Folk | 1894 |
| A Night in Acadie | 1897 |
| A Vocation and a Voice | 1991 |
Publication Order of Collections
| The Complete Works of Kate Chopin | 1969 |
| A Kate Chopin Miscellany | 1979 |
| Kate Chopin’s Private Papers | 1998 |
About Kate Chopin
Kate Chopin (1850 to 1904) was an American author of novels and short stories set largely in Louisiana. She is best known for her second novel, “The Awakening” (1899), and for stories such as “Désirée’s Baby” and “The Story of an Hour”, and is regarded by scholars as a forerunner of 20th-century American feminist writers.
She was born Katherine O’Flaherty in St. Louis, Missouri, on 8 February 1850. Her father was a businessman who had emigrated from Galway, Ireland, and her mother belonged to the city’s French community. After her father died in a railway accident in 1855 she grew up in a household of widowed women, and was educated at the Sacred Heart Academy in St. Louis, graduating in 1868.
In 1870 she married Oscar Chopin and settled with him in New Orleans, where they had five sons and a daughter between 1871 and 1879. When his cotton brokerage failed in 1879 the family moved to Cloutierville in Natchitoches Parish, to run several small plantations and a general store. Oscar died in 1882, leaving heavy debts. Chopin kept the business going for a time, then sold it and returned to St. Louis, where her mother died the following year.
A family friend, the physician Frederick Kolbenheyer, encouraged her to write. Her first novel, “At Fault”, was privately published in 1890, and through the 1890s her stories appeared in magazines including “The Atlantic Monthly”, “Vogue”, “The Century Magazine” and “The Youth’s Companion”. Two collections followed: “Bayou Folk” (1894) and “A Night in Acadie” (1897).
“The Awakening” is the story of a married woman at odds with the society around her, set in New Orleans and on Grand Isle. Most reviewers condemned it for its treatment of female sexuality, motherhood and marital infidelity. Chopin went on writing short stories, but a planned third collection, “A Vocation and a Voice”, was cancelled by her publisher and did not appear as a volume until 1991.
She suffered a brain haemorrhage after visiting the St. Louis World’s Fair and died on 22 August 1904, aged 54. Her work was largely forgotten by the 1950s. The revival began in 1969, when the scholar Per Seyersted published a biography and “The Complete Works of Kate Chopin”, which printed her story “The Storm” for the first time.
Photo: Missouri History Museum, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons (cropped).