Volume 17, Number 4 · September 23, 1971
Sensuous Women
By Jean Stafford
Kate Chopin, A Critical Biography
by Per Seyersted
Louisiana State University Press, 246 pp., $8.50
The Complete Works of Kate Chopin
edited by Per Seyersted, Foreword by Edmund Wilson
Louisiana State University Press, 1,032, 2 vols pp., $10.00 each
The confident and insouciant holder of this view is a young Creole matron who, with her children ('About every two years she had a baby') and with other young women and their children of the same ilk, summers at a pension on Grand Isle in the Gulf of Mexico to escape the city heat and the threat of yellow fever in New Orleans. Mme. Ratignolle's friend and protégée, Edna Pontellier, is the heroine of Kate Chopin's novel The Awakening, which, when it was published in 1899, was looked upon as so immoral, so revealing of 'positively unseemly' truths that in St. Louis, Mrs. Chopin's native town, the libraries banned it. She was cut dead by friends and acquaintances and, if this were not humiliation enough, she was blackballed when she was put up for membership in the St. Louis Fine Arts Club, a stigma that must not have been so quaint as it appears now since her writing career, which had theretofore thrived comfortably, began to peter out; after her disgrace—which apparently came to her as a surprise—she wrote only a handful of stories. She died at the age of fifty-three after a visit to the St. Louis Exposition of 1904 and her work (three novels, a hundred or more stories, a few poems and essays) went into eclipse.
Review, 3489 words
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