Book Description
From ruined Louisiana plantations to bustling, cosmopolitan New Orleans, Kate Chopin wrote with unflinching honesty about propriety and its strictures, the illusions of love and the realities of marriage, and the persistence of a past scarred by slavery and war. Her stories of fiercely independent women, culminating in her masterpiece The Awakening (1899), challenged contemporary mores as much by their sensuousness as their politics, and today seem decades ahead of their time. Now, The Library of America collects all of Chopin's novels and stories as never before in one authoritative volume.

The explosive novel At Fault (1890) centers on a love triangle between a strong-willed young widow, a stiff St. Louis businessman, and the man's alcoholic wife. In the story collections Bayou Folk (1894) and A Night in Acadie (1897), Chopin transforms the local color sketch into taut, perfectly calibrated tales of post-Civil War bayou culture. In The Awakening, the now-classic novel that scandalized many of her contemporaries and effectively ended her writing career, Chopin tells the story of a restless, unsatisfied woman who embarks on a quixotic search for fulfillment.

The volume also includes all the stories not collected by Chopin, including those meant for "A Vocation and a Voice," a projected volume that her publisher canceled in 1900, and three stories that were found in 1992 in a long-lost cache of Chopin's papers.


About the Author
Sandra M. Gilbert, Professor of English at the University of California, Davis, has published criticism, a memoir, and six collections of verse. Most recently she is the author of Kissing the Bread: New and Selected Poems 1969-1999 (2000).

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In works set on ruined Louisiana plantations and in bustling New Orleans, Kate Chopin wrote with unblinking honesty about the strictures of propriety, the illusions of love and the realities of marriage, and the persistence of a past scarred by slavery and war. Her stories challenged contemporary mores as much by their sensuousness as their politics. Complete Novels and Stories gathers all of Chopin's extraordinary fiction for the first time.

The novel At Fault (1890) is an explosive melodrama centered on a love triangle between a strong-willed young widow, the stiff St. Louis businessman who buys timber rights to her plantation, and the man's alcoholic wife. In the story collections Bayou Folk (1894) and A Night in Acadie (1897), Chopin transforms the local color sketch into dazzling literary art, crafting perfectly calibrated tales of Louisiana culture with sympathetic insight. Suffused with a rich sense of place, Chopin's charming and often provocative stories bring to life the enticing world of the Louisiana bayou.

But The Awakening (1899), which scandalized many of her contemporaries and effectively ended her career, marks the true measure of her achievement. This story of a deeply unsatisfied woman embarking on a quixotic search for fulfillment brings together Chopin's great themes: the feminine longing for liberation from convention, the place of the woman artist in society, and the mysterious links between desire, birth, and death. Rendered with precision, detachment, and a suggestive ambiguity that defies easy judgments, The Awakening restored Chopin to literary prominence after its rediscovery by critics in the 1960s and 1970s.