"Over the fourteen years that Kate Chopin lives in New Orleans and rural Louisiana, she was besieged--strife, horror, exile, the death of her young husband, isolation as a single mother and bankruptcy. Despite it all, or perhaps in some ways due to it all, she became America's first great female novelist. Her time in Louisiana inspired more than one hundred short stories and both novels she wrote. Moral fiber kept her striving amid rejection and destitution, and at the age of forty, she began a writing career that left an indelible mark on our literary history."--Back cover.
