Episode Details

In 1882, a widow in rural Louisiana with six children discovered her late husband had left her the equivalent of $1.4 million in debt. Instead of fading into mourning, Kate Chopin ran the family business herself, scandalized her neighbors, and went on to become one of the most pioneering and controversial voices in American literature. This deep dive traces her life from a St. Louis household of three generations of widows who never remarried, through the Civil War, her marriage to Oscar Chopin, and the collapse of his cotton brokerage that moved the family to Cloutierville.

We explore how her doctor prescribed writing as a cure for depression and a source of income, how Guy de Maupassant's realism shaped her style, and how she used the popular local color genre as a Trojan horse for subversive feminist psychology. From the devastating twist of Desiree's Baby to the 1899 publication of The Awakening, which critics called poison and which effectively ended her career, we follow her erasure from literary memory and her improbable resurrection in the 1970s, when a paperback edition landed at the height of second-wave feminism.

• How the legal doctrine of coverture explains why the women who raised Chopin refused to remarry
• The financial literacy taught by the nuns at Sacred Heart Academy that later saved her family
• Desiree's Baby and Chopin's dismantling of racial passing and Southern patriarchy
• The Awakening as a direct argument against Darwin's theory of male sexual selection
• Edmund Wilson, Per Seyersted, and the 1972 New York Times column that brought her back into print