Read · Listen · Learn
2016-07-07
This very short story by the American writer, Kate Chopin, tells us about a young, but sick, married woman, when she believes that her husband’s death in a train accident will allow her to live her own life (800 words).
Chopin was born in 1851 in the southern U.S. state of Missouri. Her father came from Ireland and her mother’s family was from Canada. Kate married at twenty after she finished school and, before she was thirty, she had six children.
Chopin started writing because she was so unhappy after the deaths of her husband and mother. At first, she wrote novels. However, her feminist ideas were very unpopular at that time. She changed to short stories but never made much money from these either. She died in 1904 but she was only seen as a great writer in the 1960s and ‘70s when her ideas about women’s rights were not so unusual.