Author Description

Kate Chopin was thirty-four years old and the widow of a near-bankrupt cotton factor from an old southern family when she returned to her native St. louis with her six children. Her first books and stories gained her national celebrity as an outstanding local-color writer, but all tht chaned in 1899 with the publicaiton of "The Awakening". Its sympathetic portrayal of a young woman's adulterous love affair and the unprecedented candor of its heroine's erotic longings shocked hte popular taste of the day - and its author, condemed and ostracized, died soon after. In the 1960's, as the women's movemetn was taking shape, a new generation discovered "The Awakening" and made Kate Chopin its standard-bearer. Her story, fully told for the first a fascinating and ocmplex woman who not only lived by her own rules, but whose lide was the basis for the legendary fiction she created. The conven-school-eduacted daughter of a prosperous Missouri family with Confederate sympathies, she married at twenty and eventually settled, with her husband, Oscar, among his people in Louisiana's Cane River country. There Kate Chopin's unconventional temperament and personal flamboyance asserted themselves, stirring up gossip and debate among the locasl, but it was also in the sensual atmosphere of Louisiana, with its warm, dark nights, that the young wife, who had married early and possible withough passions, discovered her own deep desires. Oscar Chopin's untimley death from malaria in 1882 - a crisis described in a gripping dtail - brought the family's deteriorating financial circumstances to a hear; but it also vecame the even that would direct the rest of Kate Chopin's life and writing. Rejecting the future that might have been expected of her as the pious guardian of her husband's memory, she would later embark on a scandalous affair with a married man, a realationship revealed here for the first time and one that ultimatley propelled her ourt of the conventiaonal life and into the world of the avant-garde writer who finally went too far. On her return to St. Louis, Kate Chopin transformed the passion of her Louisiaa days into the sensual rhthms of prose and into realistic stories about other passionate, discontented women who wanted to break free. Endowed with vigorous energy and determination, she wrote over one hundred short stories, novels, plays, reviews, essays, and poems in her fourteen years as a writer - a formidable literary output that mde her one of the most prolific writers of her era. For such a major figure, a major biography was needed. Seven years in the writing, "Kate Chopin" is a work of immense scholarship. Emily Toth's extensive knowledge of the geographical, literary, and social worlds in which Kate Chopin moved brings exceptional woman vivid life. Cutting through the sea of inaccuracy and speculation that has formed Chopin's legacy, Emily Toth not only reveals the truth behind the alleged banning of "The Awakening", but also offers an enthralling portrait of a woman with twentieth-century ideas living in a nineteenth-century world, allowing us to understand why and how Kate Chopin became heroine and pioneer to readers who treasure her writings fervently.