Product Description: Ms. Mentor, that uniquely brilliant and irascible intellectual, is your all-knowing guide through the jungle that is academia today. In the last decade Ms. Mentor's mailbox has been filled to overflowing with thousands of plaintive epistles, rants, and gossipy screeds...read more

Product Description: The juicy biography of the scandalous novelist who lifted the lid off a New England town Indian summer is like a woman. Ripe, hotly passionate, but fickle, she comes and goes as she pleases so that one is never sure whether she will come at all, nor for how long she will stay...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

This is the true, unvarnished life story of the girl who grew up to write The Awakening, a masterpiece published 100 years ago. With its portrayal of a woman whose sexual desires take her outside marriage, it rocked American literature’s cozy conception of womanhood.In Unveiling Kate Chopin Emily Toth, the foremost authority on Chopin’s life and works, creates a sharply revealing portrait of a modern woman in a Victorian world. Born in St. Louis in 1850, Kate O’Flaherty was raised by wealthy, feisty widows and educated by brilliant nuns. She endured a mysterious “outrage” committed against her by Union soldiers in her teens and suffered what moderns now call a “loss of voice.” But she survived to become a lively, dangerously clever social observer.She had the talent and then the life experiences to become a writer. Her Louisiana-born husband, Oscar Chopin, had grown up in France and did not restrict her. In New Orleans (where she gossiped with the painter Edgar Degas) and then in rural Louisiana (where the neighbors hated her), Kate produced six children in nine years. Yet she retained her individuality and her wicked sense of humor. After her husband’s sudden death, Kate’s affair with another woman’s husband was a village scandal―but following the lessons of the French women who raised her, she knew when to leave.After the death of her mother, Kate reinvented herself as the author of engaging short stories set in Louisiana. Many had unusual social messages. “In Sabine” opposed domestic violence. “At the ’Cadian Ball” supported sexual expression for women. “Odalie Misses Mass” suggested that interracial friendships between African American and white women were possible. She condemned the idle rich and celebrated single mothers. To promote her own career, she created the first salon in St. Louis and became the first woman in the city to become a professional fiction writer. Although she claimed to be un-serious about her craft, newly discovered manuscripts, which Toth mines for the insights they offer, reveal her as a dedicated artist who wanted to reach her readers’ hearts.Toth portrays Chopin as a bright, ambitious woman who ruffled staid souls, and when she published The Awakening, her foes pounced. Many reviews of the novel were uncomprehending; many were vicious and her next book was canceled. Her family suffered; her health declined; and Chopin died in 1904, silenced ahead of her time. Now, a century later, Toth sees Chopin as a woman of unique wit and astonishing talent and as the daring author who wrote the most radical, notorious American novel of the late nineteenth century.

Product Description: Toth and Seyersted's well-organized, carefully edited volume makes available all manuscripts and related items from all archival collections.... This volume is essential for American literature collections." ―ChoiceAn edition of the primarily unpublished papers of Kate Chopin, author of the feminist classic The Awakening...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: "Toth and Seyersted's well-organized, carefully edited volume makes available all manuscripts and related items from all archival collections.... This volume is essential for American literature collections." ―ChoiceAn edition of the primarily unpublished papers of Kate Chopin, author of the feminist classic The Awakening...read more

Product Description: In question-and-answer form, Ms. Mentor advises academic women about issues they daren't discuss openly, such as: How does one really clamber onto the tenure track when the job market is so nasty, brutish, and small? Is there such a thing as the perfectly marketable dissertation topic? How does a meek young woman become a tiger of an authority figure in the classroom-and get stupendous teaching evaluations? How does one cope with sexual harassment, grandiosity, and bizarre behavior from entrenched colleagues?Ms...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

A biography of the author of 'The Awakening' traces Chopin's life and career, portraying her as an unconventional and complex woman who lived by her own rules, and explores the ways in which her life and experiences influenced her writings

Gathers stories about suicide, death, infidelity, dreams, hypnosis, adolescence, convent life, child abuse, and social outcasts (view table of contents)

Essays consider women writers from New England, the Midwest, the Appalachian Mountains, and the South, the psychology of regions, and new themes in regional writing