Unveiling Kate Chopin
by Emily Toth

A vivid new biography of the author of The Awakening marking the 100th anniversary of its publication

Aided by newly discovered diaries and manuscripts, Emily Toth tells the unvarnished story of the passionate Irish American girl from St. Louis who grew up to write The Awakening. Published in 1899, Kate Chopin's novel about a sensual, artistic woman whose desires cannot be contained by marriage and motherhood stunned and infuriated Chopin's contemporaries. She "commits unutterable crimes against polite society," wrote one fuming reviewer.

In Unveiling Kate Chopin, Toth, the foremost authority on Chopin's life and works, draws on manuscripts recently found in a Massachusetts warehouse and paints a haunting portrait of this woman who married a Louisiana Frenchman, mothered six children, and wrote a novel that was too worldly for Victorian America. She celebrates the ambitious Chopin as an artist of unique wit and astonishing talent, as one of the first authors to craft a public image (by creating a salon and inventing networking in St. Louis), as a writer of short stories set in the Louisiana bayou country, and especially as the daring author of the most radical, notorious American novel of the late nineteenth century.

Emily Toth is a professor of English and women's studies at Louisiana State University.