Kate Chopin (/ˈʃoʊpæn/,[1][2] also US: /ʃoʊˈpæn, ˈʃoʊpən/;[3] born Katherine O'Flaherty; February 8, 1850[4] – August 22, 1904)[5] was an American author of short stories and novels based in Louisiana.

She is considered by scholars[6] to have been a forerunner of American 20th-century feminist authors of Southern or Catholic background, such as Zelda Fitzgerald, and she is among the most frequently read and recognized writers of Louisiana Creole heritage.

For two years, she was tutored at home by her great-grandmother, Victoria (or Victoire) Charleville, who taught French, music, history, gossip, and the need to look on life without fear.

[12] After those two years, Kate went back to Sacred Heart Academy, which her best friend and neighbor, Kitty Garesche, also attended, and where her mentor, Mary O'Meara, taught.

The Chopins had six children between 1871 and 1879: in order of birth, Jean Baptiste, Oscar Charles, George Francis, Frederick, Felix Andrew, and Lélia (baptized Marie Laïza).

The family left the city and moved to Cloutierville in south Natchitoches Parish to manage several small plantations and a general store.

The scholar Emily Toth noted that "for a while the widow Kate ran his [Oscar's] business and flirted outrageously with local men; (she even engaged in a relationship with a married farmer).

"[17] Although Chopin worked to make her late husband's plantation and general store succeed, she sold her Louisiana business two years later.

[19] By the early 1890s, Chopin's short stories, articles, and translations appeared in periodicals, including the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and in various literary magazines.

The critics considered the behavior of the novel's characters, especially the women, as well as Chopin's general treatment of female sexuality, motherhood, and marital infidelity, to be in conflict with prevailing standards of moral conduct and therefore offensive.

However, she never earned a significant amount of money from her writing, instead living off of the investments she made locally in Louisiana and St. Louis of the inheritance from her mother's estate.

Here was life, not fiction; for where were the plots, the old fashioned mechanism and stage trapping that in a vague, unthinkable way I had fancied were essential to the art of story making.

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; and who, in a direct and simple way, told us what he saw...[23]Kate Chopin is an example of a revisionist myth-maker because she revises myth more realistically about marriage and female sexuality of her time.

[24] For instance, in "The Storm", portraits of women were revised by Kate Chopin to obtain consummation in roles other than marriage to evince a passionate nature considered inappropriate by conventional, patriarchal standards of Victorian America.

Instead of dreading the lonely years ahead, she stumbles upon another realization: She knew that she would weep again when she saw the kind, tender hands folded in death; the face that had never looked save with love upon her, fixed and gray and dead.

Through her stories, Chopin wrote a kind of autobiography and described her societies; she had grown up in a time when her surroundings included the abolitionist movements before the American Civil War, and their influence on freedmen education and rights afterward, as well as the emergence of feminism.

In order for a story to be autobiographical, or even biographical, Marquand writes, there has to be a nonfictional element, but more often than not the author exaggerates the truth to spark and hold interest for the readers.

[26][27] By the early 1890s, Chopin forged a successful writing career, contributing short stories and articles to local publications and literary journals.

[26][27] The short story "Désirée's Baby" focuses on Chopin's experience with interracial relationships and communities of the Creoles of color in Louisiana.

Kate Chopin was talented at showing various sides of marriages and local people and their lives, making her writing very broad and sweeping in topic, even as she had many common themes in her work.

[31] To demonstrate this, Cutter claims that Chopin's earlier stories, such as "At the 'Cadian Ball", "Wiser than a God", and "Mrs. Mobry's Reason" present women who are outright resisting, and are therefore not taken seriously, erased, or called insane.

[32] Chopin reacted to the negative events happening to her by commenting ironically:I never dreamt of Mrs. Pontellier making such a mess of things and working out her own damnation as she did.

But when I found out what she was up to, the play was half over and it was then too late.According to Bender, Chopin was intrigued by Darwin's The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex.

Bender argues that in her writing, Chopin presented women characters that had selective power based on their own sexual desires, not the want of reproduction or love.

[41] in 1911 he wrote in Reedy's Mirror: "To one who has read her as a boy and come back to her again with powers of appreciation more subtly developed, she breathes the magic of a whole chapter in his life.

That started to change in 1962, when noted literary critic Edmund Wilson included her as one of 30 authors discussed in Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War.

It took a brief commentary by novelist Linda Wolfe in the September 22, 1972, issue of The New York Times to kickstart the rediscovery of Chopin by the general public.

A blurb from Wolfe's comments was featured prominently below the title and author's name at the top of the cover: "'Speaks to me as pertinently as any fiction published this year or last.

[40] Academics and scholars began to put Chopin in the same feminist categories as Louisa May Alcott, Susan Warner, and Emily Dickinson.

Parallels between Alcott and Chopin have been drawn to point out how both authors wrote about women who departed from their traditional roles by dreaming of or striving for independence and individual freedoms, also described as a dramatization of a woman's struggle for selfhood.