Kate Chopin's father, Thomas O'Flaherty, was a wealthy Irish immigrant who married into an old French Creole family. Chopin received a traditional Catholic education, which she supplemented by reading contemporary European literature. She married Oscar Chopin in 1870 and moved to Louisiana where she had six children. After her husband's death in 1883, she undertook the management of the plantations, apparently quite successfully. She carried on this work for more than a year, but finally yielded to her mother's urging to return to St. Louis. In 1884 she came back to St. Louis and at age 36 she began to write. Some of her published works include The Awakening (1899), At Fault (1890), A Night in Acadie (1897), and Bayou Folk (1894), as well as numerous poems and short stories. Until the early 1960s, she was best known as a local colorist, since most of her short stories dealt with scenes from Creole Louisiana. With the recent interest in women's studies, her works, and primarily her novel The Awakening, which concerns a woman's sexual awakening, have been reexamined extensively.