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”) Parish in northwestern Louisiana. After a honeymoon in Europe, the couple settled in the American quarter of New Orleans, where Oscar returned to work as a cotton factor, a potentially lucrative position as middleman between growers and traders. Intolerant of outsiders, Kate’s new relatives were scandalized by her frank manner and her habits of smoking cigarettes and strolling the city by herself. However, while Chopin would frequently depict fictional women who feel restricted by their husbands, there is little evidence that she was dissatisfied with her own marriage. The Chopins had six children, and they often left the oppressive heat of New Orleans in the summer to vacation in Grand Isle, the Creole resort that is the setting of the first half of The Awakening.

When Oscar’s business failed, the Chopins moved to the family plantation in Cloutierville (pronounced “cloochy-ville”). There, Kate gave birth to her only daughter, Lelia, and helped Oscar run a general store until his death. Despite Oscar’s popularity, his wife’s outspokenness and independence marked her as a city dweller, and she was never fully accepted into the provincial society of his hometown. After Oscar died of malaria in 1882, rumors of an affair with Albert Sampite, a married man, did nothing to improve matters. She would write about these experiences in her first novel, At Fault (1890), a tale of love between a divorced man and a widow. Out of respect for the marital bond, the widow urges him to return to his alcoholic wife, whose convenient death in a flood allows the two lovers to be united.

Chopin may have begun her serious efforts as a writer out of grief. As a young widow, she contended with the provincialism of Cloutierville for two more years before returning to St. Louis to live with her mother, Eliza. When Eliza died of cancer just one year later, Chopin was heart-broken. But she also began to participate in the intellectual life of the city and to make serious efforts to establish herself as a professional author. Although she moved in literary circles, she resisted alliance with any particular group. A brief membership in the Wednesday Club, a select coterie of women intellectuals who gathered for conversation and debate, only strengthened her distaste for such organized activities. More than once, her fiction depicts women reformers or intellectuals in unflattering terms. Concerned about his wife’s erratic behavior in The Awakening, Léonce consults the family doctor, who asks him if she has “been associating of late with a circle of pseudo-intellectual women—super-spiritual superior beings” (p. 76). These words drip with a disdain that is unrelieved by authorial commentary.

Struggling to find venues for her work, Chopin wrote regularly and kept careful records of submissions and rejections. At first, she was most successful with regional publications, placing her poem “If It Might Be” in a Chicago magazine called America and short stories in the Philadelphia Music Journal and St. Louis Post-Dispatch. It proved more difficult to access national periodicals like The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, and Century. At a time when the social conservatism of the Victorian era still prevailed, Chopin’s treatment of such controversial topics as extramarital affairs, venereal disease, murder, and miscegenation often made her work unpalatable to the major literary magazines. Eventually she would break into this market by publishing stories in nationally circulating periodicals such as Vogue, Century, and Youth’s Companion.

Among Chopin’s literary influences was the French writer Guy de Maupassant, whose realism and formal sophistication she admired. Her respect for his frank treatment of taboo subjects inspired her to translate a number of his stories, but their controversial nature made publication difficult. A more conventional early model was the eminent realist author and magazine editor William Dean Howells, who sent her a brief note of praise for her short story “Boulot and Boulotte.” For the depiction of strong, independent female characters,