Introduction

Summary

Kate Chopin (1850-1904) first published a story, 'Wiser than a God', in the Philadelphia Music Journal in 1889; her last, 'Polly's Opportunity', appeared in the Youth's Companion in 1902. The thirteen years in between marked a hugely productive career as a writer, primarily of short stories, with a novel at the beginning and at the end of the 1890s; an earlier novel, Young Dr. Gosse, she seems to have destroyed. Chopin did not work seriously at her fiction until she was a widow and had returned to her birthplace, St Louis, Missouri, to live. During her brief married life (although it was long enough for her to produce six children), she lived in Louisiana, first in New Orleans and then in Cloutierville, and it is in this southern state, in every way more French than American in its heritage and culture, that she set most of her stories and both her novels. Indeed, the publisher's advertisement for her first collection of short stories, Bayou Folk, in 1894, drew attention to the fact that Chopin's characters were 'semi-aliens' and featured in narratives 'quite unlike most American tales'. Chopin's work was published in the leading magazines of her day; she wrote for a variety of different audiences, including children, but she also found ways and exercised the means to place stories which were often daring in terms of their subject matter and expression. She was expert in her manipulation of both form and language so as to position herself to write about issues which she found compelling - issues which were often controversial. Commentators on her work are always sensitive to the level of Chopin's awareness of the editorial and critical reception of her writing in turn-of-the-century America. It is clear that the knowledge she had of the literary marketplace operated alongside a determination to write about difficult subjects.