SOURCE: Kirk Thomas, Heather. “Kate Chopin's Scribbling Women and the American Literary Marketplace.” Studies in American Fiction 23, no. 1 (spring 1995): 19-34.

In the following essay, Thomas examines works in which Chopin satirized the life and career of the typical nineteenth-century American woman fiction writer.

“I want the book to succeed,” Kate Chopin wrote in an 1894 diary entry about her short story collection, Bayou Folk. Five years later—despite disappointing reviews of her novel, The Awakening—she nonetheless queried her publisher, Herbert Stone, “What are the prospects for the book?”¹ Chopin's private and public writings confirm that she considered herself a professional writer. But her sense of herself as a woman writer, her comprehension of women's literary tradition, and her relationship with her literary foremothers—that “d_____d mob of scribbling women” Hawthorne lamented in the 1850s—are other, perhaps more interesting, questions.²

In Private Woman Public Stage, Mary Kelley...