A young wife summers on Grand Isle, learns to swim, and begins to want a life that Louisiana in 1899 has no room for. Chopin was widowed at thirty-two with six children and wrote to feed them; reviewers called this book morbid and vulgar, it was quietly dropped from the shelves, and she published almost nothing more. It waited fifty years to be read properly. Eight of her short stories follow it, among them Désirée's Baby and A Pair of Silk Stockings.
