Unveiling Kate Chopin

Widely admired today for her sensitive portrayals of women whose desires transgressed accepted norms, and for her wry commentary on the institution of marriage, turn-of-the-century author Kate Chopin was viewed by her contemporaries as an iconoclast, and they alternately praised and reviled her fiction. In this lively biography, Toth (LSU professor and author of Kate Chopin's Private Papers and Ms. Mentor's Impeccable Advice for Women in Academia) presents strong evidence that the groundbreaking, unconventional qualities of Chopin's fiction derive less from feminist conviction than from the unconventional nature of Chopin's own life. Telling the ""true story of a St. Louis society belle who... became the author of the most radical American novel of the 1890s"" (that is, 1899's The Awakening), Toth argues that, as the child of a Creole mother and a first-generation Irish father, as a St. Louis ""Yankee"" who spent much of her adult life in New Orleans and rural Louisiana, and particularly as a girl who grew up in a house full of strong women and who was never subjected to the will of a male authority figure (her father died when she was five), Chopin was simply acclimated to unconventional perspectives on female destiny and traditional cultural values. But as inattentive as she may have been to the dictates of ""proper"" femininity--she smoked cigarettes in public, for example, and was a shrewd business woman--even Chopin recognized the need to restrain the more flagrantly ""improper"" themes of her fiction, and here Toth is particularly insightful. Ably blending biographical information with pithy analysis of Chopin's fiction, this book makes a convincing case for the writer's life as her richest source of material and inspiration. (Apr.)