Kate Chopin, née Katherine O’Flaherty, (born Feb. 8, 1851, St. Louis, Mo., U.S.—died Aug. 22, 1904, St. Louis), American novelist and short-story writer known as an interpreter of New Orleans culture. There was a revival of interest in Chopin in the late 20th century because her concerns about the freedom of women foreshadowed later feminist literary themes.

Born to a prominent St. Louis family, Katherine O’Flaherty read widely as a girl. In June 1870 she married Oscar Chopin, with whom she lived in his native New Orleans, Louisiana, and later on a plantation near Cloutiersville, Louisiana, until his death in 1882. After he died she began to write about the Creole and Cajun people she had observed in the South. Her first novel, At Fault (1890), was undistinguished, but she was later acclaimed for her finely crafted short stories, of which she wrote more than 100. Two of these stories, “Désirée’s Baby” and “Madame Celestin’s Divorce,” continue to be widely anthologized.

In 1899 Chopin published The Awakening, a realistic novel about the sexual and artistic awakening of a young wife and mother who abandons her family and eventually commits suicide. This work was roundly condemned in its time because of its sexual frankness and its portrayal of an interracial marriage and went out of print for more than 50 years. When it was rediscovered in the 1950s, critics marveled at the beauty of its writing and its modern sensibility.

Chopin’s work has been categorized within the “local colour” genre. Her stories were collected in Bayou Folk (1894) and A Night in Acadie (1897). The Complete Works of Kate Chopin, edited by Per Seyersted, appeared in 1969.

(Source: Britannica)

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (born July 3, 1860, Hartford, Connecticut, U.S.—died August 17, 1935, Pasadena, California), was an American feminist, lecturer, writer, and publisher who was a leading theorist of the women’s movement in the United States.

Charlotte Perkins grew up in poverty, her father having essentially abandoned the family. Her education was irregular and limited, but she did attend the Rhode Island School of Design for a time. In May 1884 she married Charles W. Stetson, an artist. She soon proved to be totally unsuited to the domestic routine of marriage, and after a year or so she was suffering from melancholia, which eventuated in complete nervous collapse. A California trip in 1885 was helpful, however, and in 1888 she moved with her young daughter to Pasadena. She divorced her husband in 1894, and, after his remarriage shortly thereafter to one of her close friends, she sent her daughter to live with them. The entire affair was the subject of scandalized public comment.

After her move to California, Perkins began writing poems and stories for various periodicals. Among her stories, “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” published in The New England Magazine in January 1892, was exceptional for its starkly realistic first-person portrayal of the mental breakdown of a physically pampered but emotionally starved young wife. In 1893 she published In This Our World, a volume of verse. For a time in 1894, after her move to San Francisco, she edited with Helen Campbell the Impress, an organ of the Pacific Coast Woman’s Press Association. She also became a noted lecturer during the early 1890s on such social topics as labour, ethics, and the place of women, and, after a short period of residence at Jane Addams’s Hull House in Chicago in 1895, she spent the next five years in national lecture tours. In 1896 she was a delegate to the International Socialist and Labor Congress in London, where she met George Bernard Shaw, Beatrice and Sidney Webb, and other leading socialists.

In 1898 Perkins published Women and Economics, a manifesto that attracted great attention and was translated into seven languages. In a radical call for economic independence for women, she dissected with keen intelligence much of the romanticized convention surrounding contemporary ideas of womanhood and motherhood. Her notions of redefining domestic and child-care chores as social responsibilities to be centralized in the hands of those particularly suited and trained for them reflected her earlier interest in Nationalist clubs, based on the ideas of the American writer Edward Bellamy, an influential advocate for the nationalization of public services. Perkins expanded on such ideas in Concerning Children (1900) and The Home (1903). In June 1900 she married a cousin, George H. Gilman, with whom she lived in New York City until 1922. Human Work (1904) continued the arguments of Women and Economics. Later books included What Diantha Did (1910); The Man-Made World (1911), in which she distinguished the characteristic virtues and vices of men and women and attributed the ills of the world to the dominance of men; The Crux (1911); Moving the Mountain (1911); His Religion and Hers (1923); and The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: An Autobiography (1935).

From 1909 to 1916 she edited and published the monthly Forerunner, a magazine of feminist articles and fiction. She also contributed to other periodicals. She joined Jane Addams in founding the Woman’s Peace Party in 1915, but she was little involved in other organized movements of the day. After treatments for the cancer that afflicted her proved ineffective, she took her own life.

(Source: Britannica)

Sandra Cisneros, (born December 20, 1954, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.), American short-story writer and poet best known for her groundbreaking evocation of Mexican American life in Chicago.

After graduating from Chicago’s Loyola University (B.A., 1976), Cisneros attended the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop (M.F.A., 1978). There she developed what was to be the theme of most of her writing, her unique experiences as a Hispanic woman in a largely alien culture.

Cisneros’s first book was Bad Boys (1980), a volume of poetry. She gained international attention with her first book of fiction, The House on Mango Street (1983), written in a defiant youthful voice that reflected her own memories of a girlhood spent trying to be a creative writer in an antagonistic environment. More poetry—including The Rodrigo Poems (1985), My Wicked, Wicked Ways (1987), and Loose Woman (1994)—followed. The children’s book Hairs = Pelitos (1994) uses the differing hair textures within a single family to explore issues of human diversity. The volume was based on an episode related in The House on Mango Street and was told in both Spanish and English.

Her collection of short stories, Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (1991), contains tales of beleaguered girls and women who nonetheless feel that they have power over their destinies. She returned to long fiction with Caramelo; o, puro cuento (2002), a semiautobiographical work that echoes her own peripatetic childhood in a large family. Have You Seen Marie? (2012) concerns the efforts of a middle-aged woman to help her friend find a lost cat while meditating on her mother’s death. The tale, which mirrored similar experiences in Cisneros’s own life, was illustrated with images by the artist Ester Hernandez. A House of My Own: Stories from My Life (2015) is a wide-ranging memoir.

(Source: Britannica)

Zadie Smith, originally Sadie Smith, (born October 27, 1975, London, England), British author known for her treatment of race, religion, and cultural identity and for her novels’ eccentric characters, savvy humour, and snappy dialogue. She became a sensation in the literary world with the publication of her first novel, White Teeth, in 2000.

Smith, the daughter of a Jamaican mother and an English father, changed the spelling of her first name to Zadie at age 14. She began writing poems and stories as a child and later studied English literature at the University of Cambridge (B.A., 1998). While there she began writing White Teeth, and at age 21 she submitted some 80 pages to an agent. A frenzied bidding war ensued, and the book eventually was sold to Hamish Hamilton. Smith took several more years to complete the novel, and in 2000 it was published to rave reviews. Set in the working-class suburb of Willesden in northwest London, White Teeth chronicles the lives of best friends Archie Jones, a down-on-his-luck Englishman whose failed suicide attempt opens the novel, and Samad Iqbal, a Bengali Muslim who struggles to fit into British society. Spanning some 50 years, the novel also details the trials and tribulations of their families, which prompted some critics to hail Smith as a modern-day Charles Dickens. The ambitious work won numerous awards, including the Whitbread First Novel Award (2000), and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Orange Prize for Fiction.

Smith’s second novel, The Autograph Man, was published in 2002. It centres on Alex-Li Tandem, a Chinese Jewish autograph trader who sets out to meet a reclusive 1950s starlet and in the process undertakes his own journey of self-discovery. The Autograph Man, which also addresses the public’s obsession with celebrity and pop culture, received mostly positive reviews. Soon after the novel’s publication, Smith became a fellow at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

On Beauty, published in 2005, further established Smith as one of the foremost British novelists of her day. The novel, heavily modeled on E.M. Forster’s Howards End, chronicles the lives of two families in the fictional town of Wellington, Massachusetts, just outside Boston. A comic work studying the culture wars and racial and ethnic overlap in a liberal college town, On Beauty was praised for its acumen and scathing satire. The novel was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize and won the 2006 Orange Prize for fiction.

NW (2012) centres on two women whose friendship—tempered by their straitened upbringings in a gritty London council estate—is tested by their divergent paths in adulthood. Though lauded for its evocative sense of place and sharply observed characters, the novel was deemed plotless and confusing by some critics. In her fifth novel, Swing Time (2016), Smith continued to explore issues of class and race while chronicling two childhood friends who both aspire to be dancers but whose lives take dramatically different turns.

Smith edited and contributed to the short-story collection The Book of Other People (2007) and published essay collections Changing My Mind (2009), Feel Free (2018), and Intimations (2020). Grand Union, a volume of her short stories, was released in 2019.

(Source: Britannica)