Her first novel At Fault was unsuccessful but she was later acclaimed for her finely crafted short stories, which focused on the Creole and Cajun people she had observed in the American South. Having read widely as a girl, she only began writing after the early death of her husband in 1882. At the age of twenty she married Oscar Chopin and moved to his native New Orleans in Louisiana. Although both character and author are less well known than those already mentioned, this character has recently been discovered by discerning readers and championed because of Chopin’s concerns regarding the freedom of women which foreshadowed later feminist literary themes and movements of female emancipation.Īmerican writer Kate Chopin was born Katherine O’Flaherty in 1850 into a prominent St Louis family. To this illustrious list one must add Edna Pontellier, the heroine of Kate Chopin’s novel The Awakening. It is interesting to note how many strong independent women feature in novels of the Nineteenth Century: Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë), Bathsheba Everdene ( Far from the Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy), Catherine Sloper, ( Washington Square, Henry James), Isabel Archer ( Portrait of a Lady, Henry James) and Jo March ( Little Women) to name a few. ‘ The Awakening is a metaphor for accessing not only the unfamiliar part of one’s consciousness but the buried truth of our society…’ David Stuart Davies looks at Kate Chopin’s influential novel, first published in 1899.
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