Biography Essay

Kate Chopin introduced to the reading public a new fictional setting: the charming, somewhat isolated region along the Cane River in north central Louisiana, an area populated by Creoles, Acadians, and blacks. Beginning in the 1960s, her fiction was also recognized for its new psychological terrain, especially in her depiction of women who experience the power of passion that often brings them into conflict with society. Instead of comparing Chopin to the Louisiana local colorists—George Washington Cable, Ruth McEnery Stuart, or Grace King; or even to Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Sarah Orne Jewett, the local colorists of New England-critics now compare her exploration of new themes to the innovations of other daring writers of the 1890s: Stephen Crane, Hamlin Garland, and Frank Norris. It is true that her first published novel, At Fault (1890), and her two published collections of short fiction, Bayou Folk...