ABSTRACT
Louisiana won a reputation for her skill in the idiom of “local-color” writing. Nourished by the influence of the French realists such as Émile Zola and Guy de Maupassant, Chopin’s first two collections of stories, Bayou Folk (1894) and A Night in Acadie (1897), show an extraordinary intimacy with the modes of life and sensibilities of the Creole and Cajun peoples, mediated through an impersonal narrative in which the characters of her stories speak for themselves, while the landscapes, houses, and social customs of this world are realised through Chopin’s intense feel for location and manners. In 1899 she published her second novel, The Awakening, a stunning account of a young wife and mother’s sexual and psychological self-discovery. In this book Chopin was far ahead of the taste of her time, and the novel was widely condemned as vulgar in treatment and sordid in theme because of its treatment of extra-marital sexual relations. The Awakening is now established as one of the classics of American fiction, and is a remarkable achievement by any standards. Editions of it now proliferate and Chopin is to be found centre-stage in most discussions of late nineteenth-century fiction, especially in writings by feminist scholars. However, much of the best commentary on her is in essays, and though she is well served by her biographers, and her texts are now scrupulously edited, there are not many book-length studies devoted to her.
