Louis society, where she was known for her wit and her great interest in music. In her late teens, Kate was a belle in St. When she graduated from the Academy of the Sacred Heart in 1868, she was known as a brilliant storyteller, an honors student, a youthful cynic and an accomplished pianist. Her beloved great-grandmother Madame Charleville died in 1863, and a month later, Kate’s adored half-brother George O’Flaherty, a 23-year-old Confederate soldier, died of typhoid fever while being held in a Northern prison.įrom 1867 to 1870 Kate kept a commonplace book – a little notebook in which she recorded diary entries and copied passages of essays, poems and other writings. Louis, a city where residents supported both the Union and the Confederacy and where her family had slaves in the house. Louis to obtain a legal separation from her husband, after which she raised her five children and ran a shipping business on the Mississippi. She also stressed the need to live life “clearly and fearlessly.” Victoria’s own mother had been the first woman in St. Kate’s great-grandmother, Victoria Verdon Charleville oversaw her education and taught her French, music and the gossip on St. Much of the fiction Kate wrote as an adult draws on the nurturing she received from women as she was growing up.
Kate chopin music full#
Thereafter Kate lived in a house full of smart, independent women: her mother, grandmother and great-grandmother – all of them widows.įrom 1855 to 1868 Kate attended the Sacred Heart Academy, where she formed deep bonds with the nuns and the lifelong friend she met at Sacred Heart, Kitty Garasche. Her father was killed two months later when a train on which he was riding crossed a bridge that collapsed. In 1855, at five and a half, Kate was sent to The Sacred Heart Academy, a Catholic boarding school in St. Kate was the third of five children, but her sisters died in infancy and her brothers (from her father’s first marriage) died in their early twenties, leaving her the only child to live past the age of twenty-five. Louis, Missouri on Februto Irish immigrant and successful businessman Thomas O’Flaherty and Creole Eliza Faris, a well-connected member of the French community in St.