In a career that lasted little more than a decade, Kate Chopin became well known for stories set in the Creole and Acadian regions of Louisiana, but her masterwork, The Awakening (1899), told the daring story of a woman who defied social and sexual conventions, eliciting negative reviews that denied Chopin prominence until the middle of the 20th century. This study of her life and work sets Chopin in the context of 19th-century American women writers to show how standards of literary propriety affected the career of a major American writer.