Louis. Her mother had come from French stock, and French was spoken in her extended family in the 1850s, though her father was Irish (her maiden name was O’Flaherty). As she visited friends and relatives, she learned that there were deep differences between the two communities in folkways and values. Her ability to function in both groups served her well when she married Oscar Chopin in 1870 and lived with him in French- and English-speaking communities in New Orleans and Natchitoches Parish in northwestern Louisiana. After Oscar’s death, she moved with her children back to St. Louis, where she wrote all her fiction and where she died at the age of fifty-four. In both St. Louis and Louisiana, she lived among comparatively prosperous, sophisticated, and well-read people.

 

Chopin composed the stories in Bayou Folk and A Night in Acadie between 1891 and 1896. It was an ideal time to write short stories. By that time three thousand or four thousand magazines and Sunday newspaper supplements were being published in the United States, and many of them included fiction. Earlier in the century, all magazines and newspapers had been regional, but by 1890 some were national, and at least twenty had circulations of more than a hundred thousand copies. Technological changes in printing and photoengraving had lowered the cost of publication for both popular and high-quality magazines, and an international copyright agreement in 1891 forced magazines to seek American writers because they could no longer so easily pirate British ones. Competition among magazines was fierce. Kate Chopin never earned her keep through her writing—she lived primarily from her real estate holdings—but she was a successful professional writer who made money with her work.

Writing short stories in the 1890s brought prestige as well as money. The short story genre had been established in the United States by Edgar Allan Poe and others earlier in the nineteenth century, and in the 1880s literary critic Brander Matthews had persuaded influential readers that the genre deserved the same respect and attention accorded to the novel. The short story became immensely popular. Readers especially liked realistic fiction and local color fiction. Kate Chopin had firsthand knowledge of a group of people in Louisiana whom American readers found interesting to read about, so her stories were well received.

Realists and local color writers pictured ordinary people living ordinary lives. The larger-than-life characters of earlier romantic writers, the Natty Bumppos and Captain Ahabs and Hester Prynnes, had demanded novels, often long novels, to hold them, but by the 1890s such characters were less in vogue, despite an occasional Isabel Archer. Realistic writers here and abroad were influenced by the work of Sigmund Freud, Charles Darwin, and Karl Marx. They understood people as molded by psychological, biological, economic, and other forces, as striving in the unremarkable events of their everyday lives to fashion decent possibilities for themselves. Short stories, Chopin learned, were perfect for capturing moments in the lives of such people, people like those her readers would meet if they went to Louisiana.

The Bayou Folk and A Night in Acadie stories show the influence of the realists—and of other writers. Kate Chopin had read widely, from Aeschylus and Shakespeare to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henrik Ibsen, Algernon Swinburne, and Walt Whitman. She knew the sentimental fiction that prospered in America throughout the nineteenth century. She studied the work of American realistic writers Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Ruth McEnery Stuart, Hamlin Garland, and others. But she was most deeply affected by French realists—especially Guy de Maupassant and Émile Zola.

Chopin read Maupassant in his original French and loved his unadorned phrasing, his frugal use of detail, his irony, and his determination to tell the truth as he saw it. “Here was a man,” she writes, “who had escaped from tradition and authority, who had entered into himself and looked out upon life through his own being and with his own eyes; and who, in a direct and simple way, told us what he saw. When a man does this, he gives us the best that he can.” She adds, “I read his stories and marvelled at them. Here was life, not fiction.”

Zola too she read in French. Although a review she wrote in 1894 is critical of one of his novels, she speaks well of his work in general and admires what he had accomplished throughout his career.

I once heard a devotee of impressionism admit, in looking at a picture by Monet, that, while he himself had never seen in nature the peculiar yellows and reds therein depicted, he was convinced that Monet had painted them because he saw them and because they were true.