The Awakening

Kate Chopin (1850-1904) was born in St. Louis and spent much of her life in Louisiana. Widowed with six children at age thirty-two, she published stories and articles often set in the Creole culture of late-nineteenth-century New Orleans. The candor and sympathy with which she explored the contours of modern women's lives were unprecedented. So prescient were Chopin's fictions that, many decades after her death, they would become touchstones for second-wave feminism.