Kate O'Flaherty Chopin was born 8 February 1851 into a prominent family in St.Louis, Missouri. Her father, Thomas O'Flaherty, an Irish immigrant, was a successful St. Louis merchant who was killed in a railroad accident when Kate was only five years old. Kate's mother, Eliza was left 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 recorded themes that appear in her later fiction, among them women's roles and the conflict between desire and duty" (Toth, 187).
On 9 June 1870, two years after graduating from the Academy, Kate married Oscar Chopin, the son of a planter from Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana. They were married for twelve and a half years, spending nine in......
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