In her own time, the works of Kate Chopin (1851-1904) shocked readers and critics with their challenge to contemporary mores. Her stories and novels reveal unsparing truths about the interior lives of women, some of whom experienced profound disillusionment with the rigid yoke of marriage, combined with an unfulfilled longing for self-realization. Celebrated today as a precursor of twentieth-century feminism, Chopin's fiction is considered to be among the masterpieces of American literature. Tru