Photo: Illustrations from "The Wilde, Wilde World".

Victorian training for a young girl. She received lessons in French, Italian, singing, dancing, piano, history, theology, and mathematics. Her early life through her teens was spent living in spacious townhouses with beautiful gardens at fashionable addresses in New York City. When her father's practice failed and he suffered financial losses in the Panic of 1837, the family was forced to move to their summer cottage on Constitution Island permanently. The family's comfortable standard of living slowly diminished until the late 1840's when they were forced to declare bankruptcy and sell many of their remaining "luxury" items, including Warner's beloved piano. Providing fuel, food and clothing became week-to-week worries. Out of these desperate straits, The Wide, Wide World was conceived. Doubting that her first novel would succeed, she chose to publish it under the pseudonym, Elizabeth Wetherell. Many publishing houses rejected the manuscript before Putnam accepted it because of his mother's insistence that The Wide, Wide World "must [be made] available for [their] fellow men." His mother also determined that "Providence would take care of this book" and very quickly her words were proven true. Warner, however, did not receive many royalties because she was forced to sell a large portion of them over to Putnam in her dire need of immediate cash. The need for money never seemed to end (largely due to the fact that what she did make went to her father's debts) and she never ceased writing in order to mend this situation. Publishers' note: Illustrations are from  "The Wild, Wilde World". Biographical text by Sharla Bell.

KATE CHOPIN  (1851-1904)*

Kate Chopin was born Katherine O'Flaherty, in St. Louis, Missouri. Her parents were from Irish and Creole backgrounds. When Chopin was widowed at 32, she began writing to support herself and her six children. She was widely accepted as a writer of local color fiction, and was generally successful until the publication of her scandalous novel The Awakening, in 1899. Perched between the social conservatism of the nineteenth century and dealing with tabooed themes too soon for the growingly open twentieth, the novel's sexually aware and shocking protagonist, Edna Pontillier, pushed Chopin into literary oblivion. Chopin, and her memorable characters and stories, finally emerged from society's morally imposed ostracization during the resurgence of women's rights in the early 1970's. Even today, much of the criticism of Chopin's most famous work centers on Edna Pontillier's morals-- is she a fallen woman, a bad mother, a selfish human being? Why does the character still, in an era where sexual openness is not totally condemned, point us toward a discussion of what makes a woman "bad?" What does the novel say about constrictions and constructions of the feminine role, today and during the time it was written? What does the novel say about human consciousness, and conscience? Chopin's most famous novel's structure and evocative natural imagery deserve more attention. Her short stories, from "A Night in Acadie" to "An Egyptian Cigarette" to "A Vocation and a Voice," are also quite interesting. Chopin was and is an accomplished writer who deserves to be discussed not only from the standpoint of one woman's "awakening" but from the position of all women and indeed, all humans, in society, today and yesterday.

These different covers of The Awakening show how some readers today interpret important images from the work-- the sea, a solitary woman, women together-- these are all important elements in the novel. I'm particularly interested in the way so many of them also use the color red-- is this intentional, or an accident of our association of "red" with "scarlet women"? What about the one with a woman reading? That's certainly different from the others . . . food for thought.

*(Note: Some biographers, including Emily Toth, cite 1850 as Chopin's birthdate, others, including Marilynne Robinson in the preface to The Awakening, say 1851).

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