Most of Kate Chopin’s short stories are set in the late nineteenth century in Louisiana, often rural Louisiana. Most of the characters, like most of the people living in Louisiana at the time, are Creoles, Acadians, “Americans” (as the Creoles and Acadians call outsiders), African Americans, Native Americans, and people of mixed race. Except for some of the Creoles, most of the characters are terribly poor, because the area has yet to recover from the devastation of the Civil War.

This collection includes Ma’ame Pelagie , a character who shows up again later [in other stories].

(from KateChopin.org and Goodreads)

More about this collection

Kate Chopin’s Wikipedia entry

Full text online – courtesy of Project Gutenberg

KateChopin.org – home of the Kate Chopin International Society

Read all Kate Chopin’s short stories online

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Note: This collection was listed in the seminal work on short story cycles, Jennifer J. Smith’s American Short Story Cycle from Edinburgh University Press. The publication date is listed in that monograph’s bibliography as 1894, as is it on Gutenberg.org. Whereas on Goodreads the work is listed as published in 1891. The cover is from Goodreads and is obviously from a modern version.