Editing Kate Chopin (section)

== Reception and legacy ==

=== Legacy ===
Kate Chopin has been credited by some as a pioneer of the early feminist movement despite not achieving any literary rewards for her works.<ref name=":5">{{cite journal|last=Cutter|first=Martha|title=The Search for a Feminine Voice in the Works of Kate Chopin|journal=Unruly Tongue: Identity and Voice in American Women's Writing|volume=127|pages=87–109}}</ref><ref name=":222"/>

=== Critical reception ===
[[File:Kate Chopin portrait T-P.jpg|right|thumb|Kate Chopin]]Kate Chopin wrote the majority of her short stories and novels from 1889 to 1904. Altogether, Chopin wrote about 100 short stories or novels during her time as a fiction writer; her short stories were published in a number of local newspapers including the ''St. Louis Post-Dispatch''.<ref name=":6">{{Citation|chapter=XII. THE AWAKENING|date=January 31, 1932|publisher=University of Pennsylvania Press|isbn=9781512805659|doi=10.9783/9781512805659-015|title=Kate Chopin and Her Creole Stories}}</ref> A large number of her short stories were published in national magazines,such as ''[[The Youth's Companion|Youth's Companion]]'' and ''[[Harper's Young People]]''. ''Bayou Folk'' was well-reviewed, with Chopin's writing about how she had seen 100 press notices about it. Those stories were published in ''[[The New York Times]]'' and ''[[The Atlantic]]''. Readers particularly liked how she used local dialects to give her characters a more authentic and relatable feel.<ref name=":6" /> She also published two novels: ''At Fault'' and ''The Awakening''. Her novels were not well-received initially, compared to her short stories. Her 1899 novel ''The Awakening'' was considered to be immoral due to the overt themes of female sexuality, as well as the female protagonist's constantly rebuking gender roles and norms. There have been rumors that the novel originally was banned, which have been disproved.<ref>{{cite journal|last1=Kessler|first1=Carol Farley|last2=Toth|first2=Emily|date=December 1991|title=Kate Chopin: A Life of the Author of The Awakening.|journal=American Literature|volume=63|issue=4|pages=755|doi=10.2307/2926892|issn=0002-9831|jstor=2926892}}</ref> Local and national newspapers published mixed reviews of Chopin's novel with one calling it "poison" and "unpleasant", going on to say it was "too strong a drink for moral babes",<ref>{{cite book|title=Research guide to American literature.|author=Franklin, Benjamin|date=2010|publisher=Facts On File|isbn=9780816078615|oclc=699681835|url-access=registration|url=https://archive.org/details/researchguidetoa0000unse}}</ref> while another newspaper published a review calling Choppn, "A&nbsp;St. Louis Woman Who Has Turned Fame Into Literature".<ref name=":8">{{cite journal|last=Toth|first=Emily|date=July 1999|title=Emily Toth Thanks Kate Chopin|journal=The Women's Review of Books|volume=16|issue=10/11|pages=34|doi=10.2307/4023250|issn=0738-1433|jstor=4023250}}</ref> The majority of the early reviews for ''The Awakening'' were largely negative. [[Emily Toth]], one of Chopin's most well known biographers, thought she had gone too far with this novel. She argued that the protagonist Edna's blatant sensuality was too much for the male gatekeepers. So much so that publication of her next novel was cancelled. 

The poet [[Orrick Glenday Johns|Orrick Johns]] was at least one strong advocate of Chopin and ''The Awakening'', calling her "an&nbsp;influential modernist poet and progressive journalist originally from St. Louis who was popular in Greenwich Village literary circles".<ref name=":0">{{Citation|last1=Ostman|first1=Heather|title=Introduction: Kate Chopin in Context: New Approaches|date=2015|url=https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137543967_1|work=Kate Chopin in Context: New Approaches|pages=1–11|editor-last=Ostman|editor-first=Heather|series=American Literature Readings in the Twenty-First Century|place=New York|publisher=Palgrave Macmillan US|language=en|doi=10.1057/9781137543967_1|isbn=978-1-137-54396-7|access-date=January 19, 2022|last2=O'Donoghue|first2=Kate|editor2-last=O'Donoghue|editor2-first=Kate}}</ref> in 1911 he wrote in [[William Marion Reedy|Reedy's Mirror]]: "To one who has read her as a boy and come back to her again with powers of appreciation more subtly developed, she breathes the magic of a whole chapter in his life."<ref name=":0" /> "...[C]redible evidence exists that Johns shared his positive views of Chopin with his literary peers, a tight-knit group that included feminist writers [[Susan Glaspell]] and [[Edith Summers Kelley]]..."<ref name=":1">{{Cite journal|last=Kornasky|first=Linda|date=2011|title="Discovery of a Treasury": Orrick Johns and the Influence of Kate Chopin's ''The Awakening'' on Edith Summers Kelley's ''Weeds''|url=http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/san.2011.0025|journal=Studies in American Naturalism|volume=6|issue=2|pages=197–215|doi=10.1353/san.2011.0025|s2cid=145614976|issn=1944-6519}}</ref> Through Johns's personal friendship with Kelley and his fierce advocacy for ''The Awakening'', it has been argued<ref name=":1" /> that Kelley read and was influenced by ''The Awakening'', a book once thought of as a literary dead end in terms of influence on the next generation of feminist writers. Textual comparisons between specific texts in Kelly's ''[https://www.feministpress.org/books-n-z/weeds Weeds]'' and ''The Awakening'' point toward an argument for its wider influence.

By the 1950s, Kate Chopin was all but forgotten. Her books were all out of print, only her story "Désirée's Baby" was in print in numerous American short story anthologies. That started to change in 1962, when noted literary critic Edmund Wilson included her as one of 30 authors discussed in ''[[Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War]]''. Unhappy that he had to read some of her works on microfilm at the Library of Congress, Wilson urged Per Seyersted, a Norwegian who had written an article on her and who was studying in America, to focus his studies on her. Seven years later, in 1969, Seyersted published ''The Complete Works of Kate Chopin'' and a full-length biography.<ref> ("Introduction") to a copy of Chopin's short story "A&nbsp;Visit to Avoyelled", ''The Library of America'', [[Facebook]], February 8, 2023, accessed February 11, 2023.</ref> These two books formed the scholarly support for a rediscovery of Chopin. 

It took a brief commentary by novelist [[Linda Wolfe]] in the September 22, 1972, issue of ''The New York Times'' to kickstart the rediscovery of Chopin by the general public. In "There's Someone You Should Know – Kate Chopin", she described how she encouraged friends disappointed with contemporary fiction to discover Chopin and how ''The Awakening'' spoke to her today.<ref>{{Cite news |last=Wolfe |first=Linda |date=1972-09-22 |title=There's Someone You Should Know |language=en-US |work=The New York Times |url=https://www.nytimes.com/1972/09/22/archives/theres-someone-you-should-know-kate-chopin.html |access-date=2023-02-22 |issn=0362-4331}}</ref> The last step required to bring the novel to general awareness happened almost immediately. Before the year was out, a major [[mass-market paperback]] publisher, [[Avon Books]], had the first mass-market paperback publication of the book heading to drug stores, supermarkets, and bookstores. A [[blurb]] from Wolfe's comments was featured prominently below the title and author's name at the top of the cover: "'Speaks to me as pertinently as any fiction published this year or last. It is uncanny, nothing else . . . A masterpiece.' Linda Wolfe, ''The New York Times''".<ref>Chopin, Kate, ''The Awakening'', [[Avon Books]], 1972, {{ISBN|0-380-00245-0}}.</ref> Within a few years, all of the major mass-market paperback publishers had editions of ''The Awakening'' in print, making it widely available for anyone to buy.

[[Per Seyersted]]'s rediscovery of Chopin caused her work to be seen as essential feminist and Southern literature from the 19th century. Seyersted wrote that she "broke new ground in American Literature". According to Emily Toth, author of a recent Chopin biography, Kate Chopin's work rose in popularity and recognition during the 1970s due to themes of women venturing outside of the constraints set upon them by society, which appealed to people participating in feminist activism and the [[sexual revolution]]. She also argues that the works appealed to women in the 1960s, "a&nbsp;time when American women yearned to know about our feisty foremothers".<ref name=":8" /> Academics and scholars began to put Chopin in the same feminist categories as [[Louisa May Alcott]], [[Susan Warner]], and [[Emily Dickinson]]. Parallels between Alcott and Chopin have been drawn to point out how both authors wrote about women who departed from their traditional roles by dreaming of or striving for independence and individual freedoms, also described as a dramatization of a woman's struggle for selfhood.<ref>{{cite journal|last=Winn|first=Harbour|date=1992|title=Echoes of Literary Sisterhood: Louisa May Alcott and Kate Chopin|journal=Studies in American Fiction|volume=20|issue=2|pages=205–208|doi=10.1353/saf.1992.0000|s2cid=162207140|issn=2158-415X}}</ref> A reviewer for ''[[Choice Reviews]]'' stated that it was ultimately a struggle doomed to failure because the patriarchal conventions of her society restricted her freedom.<ref>{{cite book|date=March 1, 1994|title=The awakening: a novel of beginnings}}</ref> Karen Simons felt that this failed struggle was perfectly captured by the ending of the novel, where Edna Pontellier ends her life due to her realization that she cannot truly be both the traditional mother and have a sense of herself as an individual at the same time.<ref>Simons, Karen (Spring 1998). "Kate Chopin on the Nature of Things" (PDF). ''The Mississippi Quarterly''. '''51.2''': p243.</ref>