However, Kate's period of married happiness didn't last for very long. After giving birth to six children, Kate became a widow in 1883 when her husband died of swamp fever. Luckily, Oscar Chopin had been a successful businessman. That way Kate didn't have to worry about feeding her children. She managed her husband's business for a year but then moved back to St. Louis, only to have her mother die the following year.
During this period of her life, she had one close friend named Dr. Frederick Kolbenheyer. He was her mother's neighbor and soon came to play an important role in Kate's life. Because of his influence and to support herself and her young family, Kate began to study science, decided to abandon her Catholicism, and started to write and publish.
Her first novel -At Fault- was published in 1890, followed by two collections of short stories, "Bayou Folk- in 1894 and "A Night in Acadia- in 1897. "The Awakening-, another popular story written by her, was published in 1899, and by then she was well known as a writer, and had published over one hundred stories, essays, and sketches in literary magazines. .
She liked her writing to be spontaneous, and normally she wrote her stories all at once, with little revision. "After the public uproar over The Awakening-, Kate wrote only seven short stories between 1900 and 1904. .
She died on August 22, 1904, after she suffered a stroke while visiting the St. Louis World's Fair.
In life, fate can be very unpredictable and sometimes ironic. In Kate Chopin's short story, The Story of an Hour, many ironic elements are used to help the reader understand the fate of the main character, Mrs. Mallard. Mrs. Mallard is a woman who at first shows difficulty in taking the news of her husband's death. Although, throughout the story, she is described to be very excited about living life without her husband. In the end, the outcome is very different from her fantasy.