Kate Chopin: Short Stories, Style and What to Learn
1850 to 1904
Quick answer: Kate Chopin craft file: the last line that cuts both ways, the hour-long story, "The Story of an Hour", "Desiree's Baby", and what her compression teaches.
Quick facts
- Born: 1850, St. Louis, Missouri, as Katherine O'Flaherty
- Died: 1904, St. Louis, aged 54
- Wrote in: English
- Known for: "The Story of an Hour", "Desiree's Baby", "A Pair of Silk Stockings"
- Signature move: A final sentence that means the opposite of what it says
- Start with: "The Story of an Hour" (1894), two pages
Chopin began writing at thirty-nine, widowed with six children, and in about a decade produced two collections of Louisiana stories, a novel that ended her career, and a handful of pieces so compressed they still set the standard for the very short story. "The Story of an Hour" runs to about a thousand words and has been taught more often than most novels.
What she actually does on the page
She compresses a life into an hour and an hour into a room. "The Story of an Hour" (1894) gives Louise Mallard the news of her husband's death, an hour alone upstairs in an armchair facing an open window, and a walk back down the stairs. Chopin spends her words on the window: the trees, the peddler, the patches of blue sky. The freedom Louise feels is never argued; it arrives through the senses, and the husband's return through the front door takes one sentence.
She lets a purchase tell a whole biography. In "A Pair of Silk Stockings" (1897) Mrs. Sommers, who has fifteen dollars and a plan to spend it on her children's shoes, buys stockings for herself, then gloves, then lunch, then a matinee, and the story ends on a cable car with her wish that it would go on forever. Nothing is said about her marriage, her past or her poverty that the sequence of purchases does not say better.
She builds a plot on a document withheld. "Desiree's Baby" (1893) turns on Armand Aubigny's conviction that his wife's ancestry has darkened their child; Desiree walks into the bayou with the baby, and only then does Armand burn her letters and find, in his own mother's hand, the truth about his own descent. Chopin puts the reveal after the tragedy so that it can save nobody.
The signature move
The double-edged last line is best dissected in "The Story of an Hour". The doctors say Louise died "of joy that kills", meaning joy at her husband's survival, and the reader, who has spent the hour with her, knows it was the opposite. The sentence is true in the doctors' world and false in the story's, and Chopin does not adjudicate. "The Storm", written in 1898 and unpublished in her lifetime, ends on a similar edge: after an afternoon of adultery in a farmhouse, "So the storm passed and every one was happy." The plain surface carries an irony the reader must decide how to weigh. In both cases the ending does not resolve the story; it hands it back.
Stories to read first
Six stories, from the Louisiana collections and Vogue.
What to steal for your own stories
Exercises drawn from the stories.
What not to copy
The dialect. Chopin's Cajun and Creole speech is rendered phonetically and now reads as period colour; some of the Bayou Folk stories are little more than that colour. Her handling of race in the plantation stories is more searching than most of her contemporaries' and still carries their assumptions, and "Desiree's Baby" is a story about racism that a modern writer would build differently. Take the compression and the two-way ending; write your own region in plain spelling.
Life at a glance
- 1850: Born in St. Louis to an Irish father and a French Creole mother
- 1870: Marries Oscar Chopin and moves to New Orleans
- 1882: Oscar dies, leaving her with six children and a failing plantation store in Cloutierville, Louisiana
- 1893: "Desiree's Baby" in Vogue
- 1894: Bayou Folk, her first collection; "The Story of an Hour" in Vogue in December
- 1897: A Night in Acadie; "A Pair of Silk Stockings"
- 1899: The Awakening; the reviews are hostile and her career stalls
- 1904: Dies after a day at the St. Louis World's Fair
What writers can take from this
- Spend your words on the window, not the thought.
- Let a sequence of small purchases or choices carry the biography.
- Withhold the explaining document until it can no longer help.
- End on a sentence that is true for one character and false for the reader.
- Keep the whole story inside one hour if you can.
Try it yourself
A person receives news in the first paragraph that appears to free them from something (a job, a lease, a promise). Write the next hour in under 900 words, mostly through what they see and hear from one chair. In the last paragraph the news is reversed. The final sentence must be spoken or thought by someone who has misread everything.
Questions
What is Kate Chopin's best short story?
"The Story of an Hour" (1894) is the most taught short story by any American woman of the nineteenth century. "Desiree's Baby" (1893) and "The Storm" are the other two most often ranked with it.
How did Kate Chopin influence the short story?
She showed that a complete story could run to a thousand words and end on an irony the author refuses to resolve, and she wrote about women's inner lives with a frankness that cost her a career. Her reputation was rebuilt in the 1960s and she is now a fixture of every anthology.
Is Kate Chopin hard to read?
No. The stories are short and the prose is clear. The Louisiana dialect in some tales takes a moment; "The Story of an Hour" has none and is the natural place to begin.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working writers. Updated September 2026.
Enter a Writory story contest
Enter the Writory Short Story Contest and have your own story read and scored out of 100. Entries close 25 November. That first entry makes you a Writorian.