The Awakening

Kate Chopin was born Katherine O’Flaherty in St Louis, Missouri on 8 Feb 1850. Her father was an Irish immigrant, and her mother was French Creole. She grew up in a predominantly female household after her father died when she was just four years old. In 1868, she graduated from the St. Louis Academy of the Sacred Heart. In 1870 she married Oscar Chopin, a local cotton trader, and together they had six children. In 1879 they moved to Cloutierville, a tiny French village in Natchitoches Parish, in northwest Louisiana where their last child and only daughter was born. In 1882 Oscar died from swamp fever, leaving Kate a widow with a large family to support, and the heir to his sizeable debts. After Oscar’s death, his widow ran their plantations and carried on a notorious romance with a married neighbour, but abruptly chose to return to St. Louis in 1884. She turned to writing in order to support her young family, publishing her first short story in 1889.

During the next decade she published two novels - At Fault (1890) and The Awakening (1899) - and nearly a hundred short stories, poems, essays, plays and reviews. A number of her works were subsequently published in literary magazines and popular American periodicals, including Vogue. Two volumes of short stories mostly set in the Cane River country of Louisiana, Bayou Folk (1894) and A Night in Acadie (1897) were acclaimed during her lifetime. But The Awakening, the story of a woman who has desires that marriage cannot fulfil, was widely condemned, and Chopin’s publisher cancelled her third short-story collection, A Vocation and a Voice. Dismayed by such a harsh reception, Chopin cut short her brief career as a novelist, and for the remainder of her life focused solely on writing short stories, poetry and reviews. Kate Chopin died on 22 August 1904 from a brain haemorrhage.

This item is eligible for free returns within 30 days of delivery. See our returns policy for further details.