Kate Chopin, a female writer and essayist, lived from 1850 to 1904. From 1894 onwards, she was pushing her career to become a well accepted author. Three of her most striking stories – “A Respectable Woman”, “The Story of an Hour”, and “Her Letters” – were about wives and their strong individualities (Toth 171). This paper is to give a feminist reading of her short story “The Story of an Hour”,
To emphasise its significance, one should mention the publication of this short story in one of the early issues of the Vogue (Toth 172).
In her stories, Chopin dared to write about women, finding their personal freedom and choosing their own ways of liberation
(Papke 2), Kate Chopin can be seen as a pre-feminist writer and her work can be treated as a feminist statement. She “however, produce[s] what one might call, for want of a better term, female moral art in works that focus relentlessly on the dialects of social relations and the position of women therein” (Papke 2). “The Story of an Hour” illuminates how a woman, after her husband’s sudden death, finds herself freed, achieves autonomy, and starts to develop self-determination