Kate Chopin

Kate Chopin's first published stories appeared in 1889, when she was thirty-nine years old. The following year, she published At Fault, her first novel. Its settings are St. Louis and the Louisiana bayou, and its principal characters are kept from acting upon their attraction to one another by the fact that one of them is married. Although the novel ends well for its protagonists, it raises complex issues about the nature of personal responsibility, moral problems that are not as easily resolved as the narrative's plot problems. In March 1894 appeared Bayou Folk, Chopin's first collection of short stories. The brevity and psychological penetration of many of these tales make clear that the greatest influence on her writing was her French contemporary Guy de Maupassant. On April 19, within a month of the volume's publication, she wrote a story called "The Dream of an Hour" (it would later come to be known as "The Story of an Hour"), which was published in Vogue in December of that year. Although its Maupassant-like plot twists, in the space of only a thousand words, may help explain this story's extraordinary popularity, it is even more notable for its shrewd and in places quite surprising insight into the mind and feelings of its central character, feelings that she has never allowed herself to acknowledge, even to herself. A Night in Acadie (1897) was a second collection, whose stories portrayed even more directly than the earlier ones the sensual natures of their female protagonists. In 1898 she wrote "The Storm." It is not surprising that she never published this work: in the context of the time in which it was written, its sexual directness and complete lack of moralizing are nothing less than astonishing.