The Independent from London, Greater London, England • 62

BOOKS BIOGRAPHY The free-thiriking Louisiana belle By Hermione Lee Kate ehsfiae flassboyaMt wad sedacttve of stories was turned down, after the furore she became depressed and wrote little more. It is ironical mat Edna Pontellier, once attacked for asking too much, has now been appropriated by feminist readers who would have liked her to ask more. A 1987 New York Tones reviewer imagined a preferable ending for the novel: "She starts swimming back toward shore, thinking of all the things her new life will bring: a divorce, a job, birth control, single parenthood, shorter The rereading, or mis-reading, suggests the biographer's difficulty: Chopin needs to be understood as ahead of, but also as part of, her time. Certainly her life is rich in "local the complicated parental mix of immigrant Irish and French Louwianan; her father's death when the bridge collapsed under the train at the opening of the New St Louis railroad; the notorious cruelty of her slave-owning Creole father-in-law, rumoured to have been the model for the vicious Simon Legree in Unde Tom's Cabin. Kate herself, cigar-smoking, flamboyantly dressed and seductive (she had several love-affairs), was a conspicuous figure even before her fame.

Emily Toth has a lively time with all this, and brings into focus some splendid minor characters, like the "New Women" of free-thinking 1890s St Louis: Rosa Sonneschem, for instance, a Zionist Hungarian immigrant, scandalously divorced from an anti-Zionist rabbi and editor of the successful magazine The American Jewess. Less successful types roll engagingly by, such as the brother-in-law who VOLUPTUOUS, restless Edna Pontelher, who leaves her Creole husband, her lovers and her children, and walks naked into the Gulf of Mexico, was the infamous heroine of Kate Chopin's novel The Awakening in 1899. After that she was forgotten; now, 100 years later, she is making a comeback. Her author has had the same fate. Notorious in her day, since her death in 1904 this sceptical, sexy, adventurous writer has been drowned in literary obscurity.

A re-awakening of interest in Kate Chopin began in the 1960s. But when Toth began working on Chopin in 1970 with Per Seyersted (who wrote the first scholarly biography), hardly anyone had heard of her. Now she is on all the reading lists, a shining example of how feminist can change the literary canon. Chopin's publishing history makes an absorbing story. A convent-educated Louisiana belle, nie OTlaherty, married at 20 to a Creole businessman called Oscar Chopin, widowed young with six children and a debt-ridden estate, she didn't start turning her early diary- and poetry-writing into a profession until she was 40.

Her two books, Bayou Folk and A Night in Acadie, with their short tales of marriages and romance in the post-bellum Creole society of St Louis and New Orleans and the lush farming country around, seemed safe enough to the genteel American magazine-reading public of the 1890s: they were praised for their quaint "local colour" charm. Riit Oinpin fwhinHng, wirfriy iwri, musical, independent, impatient of Southern parochialism, atheistic shalt not KATE CHOPIN: A Life of the Author of The Awakening by Emily Toth, Century 20 preach" was her commandment) and more in debt to Ibsen, Whitman, Maupassant (whom she translated) and Flaubert than to safer models like Sarah Orne Jewett Well before The Awakening, she slipped in taboo-breaking stories of wife-beating, syphilis, black oppression, the pains of pregnancy and the pleasures of adultery. "Atntnajse" is a scintillating sketch of a young wife who discovers "a constitutional disinclination for marriage'', "A Respectable Woman" deliriously edges its good housewife towards desire and passion. "The a funny, erotic story of an afternoon's adultery which results in die woman's being much nicer to her husband and the lover writing kindly to his wife, ends, laconically: "So the storm passed and everyone was happy." Chopin's stories became increasingly ruthless and hard to place. (She didn't even try to publish The But The Awakening, which subverted die chaste traditions of nim teenth-century American women's fiction, and made what is still a disturbing satire on romance as a solution to marital discontent, was found "sad and mad and Toth corrects the myth mat the novel was banned, but makes it dear that when Chopin's next volume went broke after exhibiting what was supposed to be Uncle Tom's authentic cabin at the Chicago Columbian Exposition of 1893.

But it is all rather chatty, and I wanted more context: a more informative overview of the social structures of the post-war Deep South, a better understanding of Chopin's intellectual inheritance, especially of her interest in science and evolution. I had had a suspicion that mis biographer got a little too dose to her material when she mentioned in the acknowledgements that "Havi Shafer served as a feline muse for much of this project. Her Meow Mix is made at the Ralston Purina plant, on the site of Kate OTlaherrs first home." The golden retrievers of Egypt sessed with their collection of Egyptian art and papyri; if Lord Carnarvon had not gone to Egypt to recuperate from the effects of a car accident; if the two of them had not met, thus supplying Carter with the patron he desperately needed as a substitute for education or familial advantages If all these things had not come about, then the riches of the tomb might still be bidden in the rock. Carter is the epitome of the self-taught expert He went out to Egypt at tile age of 17, entirely unqualified but a gifted draughtsman, and progressed through routine work as a copyist of tomb to be Inspector of Monuments for Upper Egypt and Nubia by the time he was 25. His progress was fraught with contention; he fell out with colleagues, with the Egyptian authorities, with the Press.

But you cannot help admiring the tenacity and the single-minded application. He was a man with an obsession, and shares something with the nameless forgot-ten people who are the real celebrities of the tomb, the craftsmen who created those marvellous objects. IN THE immediate aftermath of the discovery of the Tutankhamun tomb in 1922 mere was an outbreak of Howard Carter and his patron Lord Carnarvon became instant celebrities. Thousands of people converged on Luxor. Fifty years later, when the treasures were brought to the British Museum for the commemorative exhibition, the dairy queue was hundreds of yards long.

It is, of course, the archaeological discovery that defies all competition: suspense, fabulous riches, an atmosphere of contention, a hint of die supernatural. But it is also an indication of the curious way in which ancient Egyptian artefacts have exercised a perennial fascination on the West By the 1920s the direction of influence had become so confused that one of Carter's contemporaries, opening another tomb, could remark innocently that the furniture he found there had a distinctly "Empire" look to it This first biography of Howard Carter describes how the Valley of the Kings, in the early part of this century, was a sort of archaeological By Penelope Lively HOWARD CARTER and the Discovery of the Tomb of Tutankhamun by Winatone, Constable 20 an early OPEC system, releasing on to the market a contxolk supply of mis valuable natural resource. When I was a small child in Cairo the late 1930s, the opening of the Tutankhamun tomb some 15 years before was already legendary, but such an abiding topic of conversation that I grew up under the distinct impression that it was my parents who had carried out the excavation. To see the finds in Cairo Museum today is to be whisked bade to that atmosphere there they are, housed in the same dusty cabinets, with tiie same perfunctory labelling. Personally, I prefer it thus; it seems appropriate that they should remain Klondike.

Those interested fought over concessions from the Department of Antiquities in Cairo, hired themselves a labour force and dug; some struck gold, most did not The Valley must have resembled a giant antheap, and from the viewpoint of today there seems a fine line between this activity and mat of the three millennia of tomb-robbers who made it so tiresomery impossible to find an intact royal buriaL Of course, mere were serious archaeologists at work: Howard Carter was one. But there is a distinct whiff of the treasure hunt, enhanced by the subsequent rows over the division of the spoils between Cairo Museum and the lessees of the individual concessions. In some ways, the traditional excavators had managed things better. It was Carter who tracked down the vast cache of finds, hoarded over centuries, whence the inhabitants of the local tomb-robbing village had operated locked into the age of their discovery. They conjure up, now, not just the Eighteenth Dynasty, but the period eloquently evoked by the photographs in this Lord Carnarvon's cigarette-holder, Carter's tweed waistcoats, the open Bentley emerging from its tomb garage, Lady Evelyn's lunch party in the desert, with suffragis serving behind a white-dothed buffet table.

Carter's biographer is determined to give the man his due, and in particular to set the record as straight as is possible in the light of subsequent claims about the extent to which he and Carnarvon may have done a little discreet appropriation of objects from the tomb. Carter was undoubtedly a difficult fellow, but an interesting one. His career is a fine instance of the operation of contingency in a life. If he had not happened to fall in with a neighbouring family of grandees in Suffolk as a boy, and become ob Mflm1laifmlOAhWmmm a to. Bjlll sva THE INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY 24 MARCH 1991.