Biography of Kate Chopin by Neal Wyatt Kate Chopin was born Kate
O'Flaherty in St. Louis, Missouri in 1850 to Eliza and Thomas
O'Flaherty. She was the third of five children, but her sisters
died in infancy and her brothers (from her father's first
marriage) in their early twenties. She was the only child to
live past the age of twenty-five. In 1855, at five and a half,
she was sent to The Sacred Heart Academy, a Catholic boarding
school in St. Louis. Her father was killed two months later when
a train on which he was riding crossed a bridge that collapsed.
For the next two years she lived at home with her mother,
grandmother, and great-grandmother, all of them widows. Her
great-grandmother, Victoria Verdon Charleville oversaw her
education and taught her French, music, and the gossip on St.
Louis women of the past. Kate O'Flaherty grew up surrounded by
smart, independent, single women. They were also savvy and came
from a long line of ground breaking women Victoria's own mother
had been the first woman in St