The popularity in her own time of such localcolorist qualities, combined with the condemnation of her frank depiction of female sexuality in
The Awakening (1899), have somewhat obscured Chopin's other achievements. Literary historians of the first half of this century perpetuated some important misjudgments or misinformation about her fiction and her career, typically praising her as the author of "Desiree's Baby" (a short story about, among other things, the tragic effects of miscegenation) while seldom mentioning
The Awakening, now considered her masterpiece. On occasion the plot of the short story has been attributed to the novel. A corrective to the stale second- or thirdhand assessments of her work came in 1946, when the French critic Cyrille Arnavon called attention to Chopin's place in the realistic tradition of France and America. Although she treats in
The Awakening what are basically naturalistic ideas of heredity and environment, the essence of her work remains best described as realistic. Since Arnavon's work a Chopin revival has taken place, in part stimulated by the work of another European scholar, Per Seyersted, who wrote the definitive biography and edited
The Complete Works of Kate Chopin (1969).
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