Portraits is a collection of 29 short stories by Kate Chopin, author of The Awakening, a widely popular novel also published by The Women's Press.

Each story illustrates why Kate Chopin is read now with such pleasure and recognition and was so firmly censored and castigated at the end of the nineteenth century. Her characters are full of life, faults and passion; she wrote with relish of great love, of unsatisfactory marriage, of the nature and implications of illicit romance and adultery.

Most of the stories are set in Louisiana where 'the dominant mood is one of well-nigh drunken reverie . . of soft langour creeping through the blood and mounting surely to the brain . Creoles, French Acadians and blacks are all portrayed as hedonistic, high spirited, superstitious and volatile. The relationships between their cultures provide much of the drama— and humour — in the stories, as do the relationships between the sexes.

The rage and despair with which so many woman writers speak the truth of women's experience are rarely present in Kate Chopin's work. Her knowledge of the ways in which a woman's life is circumscribed is used to effect, but in many stories, against the odds, the woman hero has the last laugh or at least a much-enjoyed moment of triumph.

Kate Chopin is earthy, optimistic, humorous and shrewd. Her stories are, as Helen Taylor describes in her excellent introduction to the collection, both an inspiration and a delight.
--back cover