Kate Chopin(1851-1904) 

1. A well-educated woman with Irish-French inheritance, anti-Yankee feelings. 

Kate Chopin was born Catherine O'Flaherty in St Louis, Missouri, on 8 February 1850. Her parents were Irish-born merchant Thomas O'Flaherty and Eliza Faris, daughter of a prominent St Louis French family. Thomas was a widower with a son, George, who died whilst serving as a Confederate soldier during the Civil War; Kate was the second child of this second marriage. A defining influence on her childhood was her French great-grandmother, who taught her to play the piano and speak French, as well as the art of storytelling. The old lady oversaw her education for over a year, after her father's death in a railway accident in 1855 necessitated her temporary withdrawal from the convent school, the Academy of the Sacred Heart, where she studied from 1855 to 1868. At the age of thirteen, Kate O'Flaherty became a minor local celebrity after tearing down a Union flag attached to her house by Yankee soldiers. 

2. A happy marriage with a degree of liberty for a 19th century woman.

Mrs Mallard, the protagonist in her "The Story of an Hour," being wrongly informed of her husband's death feels herself 'free, free, free!' and anticipates a future where 'there would be no powerful will bending hers in that blind persistence with which men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow creature'. It was only after her husband died that she began to commit herself to a serious writing.

3. The Awakening, her major achievement as a novelist.

The Awakening, the work on which Chopin's reputation chiefly rests, was published in 1899. This short novel in thirty-nine episodes of varying length, tied together by recurring imagery (of the sea for example), is the story of the sensual and psychological 'awakening' of its protagonist, Edna Pontellier, wife of the stolid but unobjectionable Léonce Pontellier and mother to his children. A summer vacation on Grand Isle leads to Edna falling passionately in love with another man, Robert Lebrun, an affair that is not consummated but which arouses such powerful sexual feelings that Edna, when parted from Robert, embarks on a physical affair with a man for whom she cares little, Alcée Arobin. She decides to become an artist and leaves the marital home and her family, heedless of scandal. At the novel's lyrical end Edna swims, naked, far out to sea, and presumably drowns.