This is an exquisite book.
It is The Awakening by Kate Chopin, in this beautiful Penguin edition.
My brief presentation is about why Kate Chopin should be remembered and celebrated as a writer here in Galway.
My thanks to John Cunningham and the Galway City Museum for giving me the opportunity to prepare this presenation as part of Culture Night in Galway, 2025.
Good evening, I am delighted to have been given this opportunity to talk on this Galway Culture Night about the writer Kate Chopin.
When we hear the name Chopin, we certainly don't see an Irish connection. We think of Frédéric Chopin, one of great composers of the 19th century, a Polish composer of French origin.
The Awakening, by Kate Chopin, is regarded as one of the great short classics.
As a former librarian, I am aware that about 30 years ago the Public Library in Seattle started a trend of making a list of short classics. Interested in reading the classics, they said, but don’t have time for all 1,200 pages of Tolstoy's War & Peace "War and Peace"?
So, Seattle decided to put together a list of mini-masterpieces that create a powerful impact in under 200 pages, as this book does
As the compilers of the Seattle list put it: The Awakening is a heartfelt story of Edna, Edna Pontellier. Her doomed search for personal fulfilment, as set out in the novel, was considered so shocking in 1899, that it had serious and negative implication for the writing career of Kate Chopin.
When I see a copies of this book in Charlie Byrnes or in Dubray’s or in the Galway City Library I always think that it is a shame that no one seems to have done anything to make Chopin's Irish connections better known. Maybe they have, but I am not aware of it.
Kate, or Katherine O'Flaherty Chopin was born 8 February 1851 into a prominent family in St. Louis, Missouri.
Kate Chopin's father was Thomas O'Flaherty. He was an Irish immigrant from Galway, leaving Ireland around 1840, I reckon. He became a successful St. Louis merchant.
He was killed in a railroad accident when his daughter Katherine O Flaherty was just five years old.
Kate's mother, Eliza. who was French, was left a wealthy widow and she raised Kate in a household, it is said, in a household "run by vigorous widows: her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother . . . were a community of women who stressed learning, curiosity, and financial independence."
The O’Flahertys were part of the Catholic Irish community in Missouri, "a devout Catholic family" some of the blurbs on her book states, and that heritage gave Chopin a grounding in Catholic traditions and values, even though her work often questioned these value or moved beyond them.
Kate was formally educated at the Academy of the Sacred Heart in St. Louis. The school which was established in 1818, is still in operation, although it has now moved location just outside St Louis, and still considers itself a school with deep respect for intellectual values.
As I say , the Academy of the Sacred Heart was a Catholic school run by French nuns, where Katherine O’Flaherty studied both French and English literature. Her upbringing in a Catholic-Irish household gave her exposure to both Irish and French Catholic traditions, which influenced the religious and cultural textures of her writing.
In St. Louis, in the mid-19th century, the Irish immigrant population was large and politically active. Chopin’s family belonged to this community’s upper middle class, which meant she grew up within an Irish Catholic social environment that prized education, music, and religious observance.
While her fiction is most closely associated with French Creole Louisiana, the Irish Catholic identity of her paternal side provided a moral and cultural backdrop against which Chopin explored themes of individuality, sexuality, and freedom. It is felt that tension between traditional Catholic values (rooted partly in her Irish heritage) and her personal artistic vision helped shape the radical honesty of her work.
On 9 June 1870, two years after graduating from the Academy, Kate married Oscar Chopin. Oscar was from a French Creole family in New Orleans.
They were married for twelve and a half years.
Kate gave birth to five boys and one girl. "Devoting herself to her family and household, she still managed to reconcile the needs of her own being with the expectations of the conventional milieu that surrounded her
She dressed unconventionally and smoked cigarettes long before smoking was an approved practice among women in her class" (Inge, 91).
When her husband, Oscar, died of malaria in 1882, he left Kate twelve thousand dollars in debt. But being a resourceful woman, she ran the family plantation for a year and then returned with her children to her mother in St. Louis. A year later, her mother, Eliza O'Flaherty, died and Kate began her career as a fiction writer in 1888.
While The Awakening is her best-known work, I am going to distribute in a moment, copies of a two page short story by Kate Chopin. It is called The Story of an Hour.
The story turns on a deceptively simple moment: a woman, Louise Mallard, learns of her husband’s sudden death — and reacts in a way that shocks both her and the reader.
The main theme, as in The Awakening is female autonomy and the longing for freedom. Chopin explores the constraints placed on women in the late 19th century, when as we know, marriage often meant subordination of the wife’s individuality.
Louise, in the story initially weeps as expected, but soon realizes she feels an exhilarating sense of release — “free, free, free!”
The story shows how Louise briefly imagines a life lived for herself.
This story critiques the restrictive social norms of Chopin’s era and highlights the complex inner lives of women who yearned for self-determination.
When The Awakening was published, most reviewers in major newspapers and magazines condemned it. Critics called it immoral, unhealthy, and unwholesome,
After the backlash, Chopin found it difficult to publish. A second novel she planned was never completed or accepted.
Today Kate Chopins reputation is much higher than in her lifetime, and The Awakening is considered a landmark of American literature.
What nearly destroyed her reputation in 1899 (the novels frank treatment of female desire and dissatisfaction with domestic life) is precisely what makes it celebrated now.
Chopin is firmly in the American canon.
When Thomas O'Flaherty left Galway around 1840, thinking about a future life in America, I reckon he had no idea that 200 years later we would be celebrating the electric writing of his daughter.
I sometimes feel that if Kate Chopin's father had never left Galway, his daughter might still have become a writer and working here in Ireland and she would probably have been known as Catríona Ní Fhlatharta!
Today , there is in existence the Kate Chopin International Society which seeks to preserve her literary significance for future generations with branches throughout North America and further afield
I think we should honour Kate Chopin in Galway. I think we that a Galway connection to the Kate Chopin International Society might be put in place. And perhaps here in Galway, we might do something as simple having an annual reading from the work of Kate Chopin.
I had thought of doing something like this when I was County Librarian as part of the Gathering Celebratiuon of 2013, but my retirement got in the way.
If anyone is interested in doing something about this in this you might contact me
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