Kate OFlaherty Chopins Biography Essay -- essays research papers fc

Kate OFlaherty Chopin was born 8 February 1851 into a prominent family in St.Louis, Missouri. Her father, doubting Thomas OFlaherty, an Irish immigrant, was a successful St. Louis merchant who was killed in a force accident when Kate was only five years old. Kates mother, Eliza was left(a) a wealthy widow and raised Kate in a household "run by vigorous widows her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother . . . a community of women who stressed learning, curiosity, and financial independence" (Toth, 187). Kate was formally educated at the Academy of the Sacred Heart in St. Louis where she kept a commonplace book "in which the thoughtful adolescent save themes that appear in her later fiction, among them womens roles and the conflict between desire and employment" (Toth, 187). On 9 June 1870, two years after graduating from the Academy, Kate married Oscar Chopin, the tidings of a planter from Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana. They were married for twelve and a ha lf years, expense nine in New Orleans and three in Cloutierville, Natchitoches Parish. During this time, Kate gave put up to five boys and one girl. "Devoting herself to her family and household, she still managed to reconcile the needs of her own macrocosm with the expectations of her conventional milieu. She dressed unconventionally and smoked cigarettes long before consume was an approved practice among women in her class" (Inge, 91). When Oscar died of malaria in 1882, he left Kate twelve thousand ...