The Independent du lieu suivant : London, Greater London, England • 62

BOOKS BIOGRAPHY The Louisiana belle VOLUPTUOUS, restless Edna Pontellier, 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 feminists can change the literary canon. Chopin's publishing history makes an absorbing story. A convent-educated Louisiana belle, O'Flaherty, married at 20 to a Creole businessman called Oscar Chopin, widowed young with six children and a debtridden 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.

But Chopin was free-thinking, widely read, musical, independent, impatient of Southern parochialism, atheistic shalt not IN THE immediate aftermath of the discovery of the Tutankhamun tomb in 1922 there was an outbreak of Howard Carter and his patron Lord Carnarvon became instant celebrities. Thousands of Klondike. people converged on Luxor. Fifty over years later, when the treasures were ment of brought to the British Museum for themselves the commemorative exhibition, the some daily queue was hundreds of yards Valley long. antheap, It is, of course, the archaeological today discovery that defies all competi- between tion: suspense, fabulous riches, an three atmosphere of contention, a hint of who made the supernatural.

But it is also an ble to indication of the curious way in Of which ancient Egyptian artefacts archaeologists have exercised a perennial fascina- Carter tion on the West. By the 1920s the tinct whiff direction of influence had become hanced so confused that one of Carter's the division contemporaries, opening another Cairo tomb, could remark innocently that the the furniture he found there had a ways, the distinctly "Empire" look to it. managed This first biography of Howard who tracked Carter describes how the Valley of finds, the Kings, in the early part of this whence century, was a sort of archaeological tomb-robbing DO The Ed by A 'RoWson 76: PREVIOUSLY IN VET US THEREFORE JOIN PETE HERO ON THE BUS JOURNEYING TO HIS PEAL THE DOG HAS BEEN COERCED FATEFUL MEETING WITH INTO WRITING THE MINISTER. BIOGRAPHY OF CON MY GOD! OH MY CESOURE. LABOUR RAY AGENT GONA WRITE SOME GUNMER BY HIS SINISTER ANY PIERS PORKER.

NOW, HAVING 160S! OH DEAR PRODUCED NAFF ALL, PETE MUST 01, ARE'S FIDO ah DEAR! JUS WE DON? DELIVER HIS NON-EXISTENT SPuT And LIKE MANUSCRIPT OR FACE HIDEOUS PENALTIES! MEANWHILE, UNBEKNOWNST 10 PETE, HIS TYPEWHITER HAS NATTEN THE BUGGER AND ENTRUSTED IT TO A COURIER BIKE COMPANY OF DUBIOUS WHILE PETE SUFFERS THE DIN NIGHT OF THE SOUL DRAMATIC IRONY OR WHAT, EN? THE INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY 24 MARCH 1991 By Hermione Lee KATE CHOPIN: A Life of the Author of The Awakening by Emily Toth, Century £20 preach" was her commandment) and more in debt to she models The stories of sion, the of adultery. sketch of tutional spectable housewife a adultery much nicer ing kindly storm Chopin's less and publish which teenth-century made what mance as found "sad the myth makes it The Those concessions Antiquities a labour struck gold, must have and from there seems this activity millennia it so find an intact course, there at was one. But of the by the of the Museum and individual traditional things down hoarded the inhabitants village Ibsen, Whitman, translated) and Flaubert like Sarah Orne Awakening, she slipped wife-beating, pains of pregnancy a young wife who disinclination for Woman" deliciously towards desire funny, erotic story which results in to her husband to his wife, ends, passed and everyone stories became hard to place. (She "The But subverted the chaste American is still a disturbing a solution to marital and mad and that the novel clear that when golden interested fought from the Departin Cairo, hired force and dug; most did not. The resembled a giant the viewpoint of a fine line and that of the of tomb-robbers tiresomely impossiroyal burial.

were serious work: Howard there is a distreasure hunt, ensubsequent rows over spoils between the lessees of concessions. In some excavators had better. It was Carter the vast cache of over centuries, of the local had operated Maupassant (whom than to safer Jewett. Well before in taboo-breaking syphilis, black oppresand the pleasures is a scintillating discovers "a "A Reedges its good and passion. "The of an afternoon's the woman's being and the lover writlaconically: "So the was happy." increasingly ruthdidn't even try to The Awakening, traditions of ninewomen's fiction, and satire on rodiscontent, was Toth corrects was banned, but Chopin's next volume By Penelope of stories was turned she became depressed It is ironical that attacked for asking appropriated by have liked her to Times reviewer for the novel: "She ward shore, thinking life will bring: a single parenthood, reading, or mis-reading, pher's difficulty: stood as ahead of, Certainly her life the complicated Irish and French death when the train at the opening road; the notorious owning Creole have been the model Legree in Uncle cigar-smoking, seductive (she had conspicuous figure Emily Toth has and brings into characters, like the thinking 1890s St for instance, a Zionist scandalously divorced rabbi and editor of The American Jewess.

engagingly by, such retrievers Lively HOWARD CARTER and the Discovery of the Tomb of Tutankhamun by Winstone, Constable £20 an early OPEC system, releasing on to the market a controlled supply of this valuable natural resource. When I was a small child in Cairo in 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 back to that atmosphere there they are, housed in the same dusty cabinets, with the same perfunctory labelling. Personally, I prefer it thus; it seems appropriate that they should remain THAT AND YET NEMESIS CANNOT BE AVOIDED! AM, JUST SORTING, OUT SOME 1 HICCURS WITH THE ICELANDIC EDITION OF PUT ON SOME NELLIES. AND COME IN! 4 down, after the furore, and wrote little more.

Edna Pontellier, too much, has now feminist readers who would ask more. A 1987 New imagined a preferable ending starts swimming back of all the things her divorce, a job, birth control, shorter The suggests the biograChopin needs to be underbut also as part of, her is rich in "local parental mix of immigrant Louisianan; her father's bridge collapsed under of the New St Louis cruelty of her father-in-law, rumoured for the vicious Simon Tom's Cabin. Kate herself, flamboyantly dressed several love-affairs), was even before her fame. a lively time with all focus some splendid "New Women" of Louis: Rosa Sonneschein, Hungarian immigrant, from an anti-Zionist the successful magazine Less successful types as the brother-in-law of Egypt locked into the age of ery. They conjure up, the Eighteenth Dynasty, period eloquently photographs in this book: narvon's cigarette-holder, tweed waistcoats, the emerging from its Lady Evelyn's lunch desert, with suffragis a white-clothed buffet Carter's biographer mined to give the man in particular to set the straight as is possible in subsequent claims about to which he and have done a little discreet ation of objects from Carter was undoubtedly cult fellow, but an His career is a fine operation of contingency he had not happened to neighbouring family of Suffolk as a boy, and the railslave- to to once been York tonew re- time.

and a the this, minor est free- the their now, not but evoked by Lord open tomb party in serving table. is his due, record the light the Carnarvon the tomb. a interesting instance of in a fall in grandees become JUST AS I FEARED, PETE! PIN LOT, JENKINS, MOWARD, HOLRED, CARPENTER, WHEN AND LADY ANTONM FRISER ARE AML WORKON6 ON GUNNER BOOKS! EVEN COLMAN AND TONY PARSONS ATE ATM! WE GOTTA MANE SURE YOURS. IS FIRST N' BEST! So HIT ME WITH IT, BABY! ACKNOYO STILL WON SIGN MR. SHAM 1 IN CREASE THE VOLTAGE? FOR RAYS SANE! FETCH ME A A 3 Kate Chopin: flamboyant and seductive went broke after exhibiting what was supposed be Uncle Tom's authentic cabin at the cago Columbian Exposition of 1893.

But it is all rather chatty, and I wanted more context: a more informative overview social structures of the post-war South, a better understanding of Chopin's tellectual inheritance, especially of her in science and evolution. I had had suspicion that this biographer got a little close to her material when she mentioned acknowledgements that "Havi Shafer served as a feline muse for much of project. Her Meow Mix is made at the Ralston Purina plant, on the site of Kate O'Flaherty's first home." sessed with their collection of tian art and papyri; if Lord Carnarvon had not gone to Egypt to recuperate from the effects of a accident; if the two of them had discov- met, thus supplying Carter with just patron he desperately needed as the substitute for education or familial the advantages If all these things Car- not come about, then the riches Carter's of the tomb might still be hidden Bentley the rock. garage, Carter is the epitome of the the taught expert. He went out to behind at the age of 17, entirely unqualified but a gifted draughtsman, and deter- gressed through routine work as and copyist of tomb paintings to be as spector of Monuments for Upper of Egypt and Nubia by the time he extent 25.

His progress was fraught may contention; he fell out with appropri- leagues, with the Egyptian authorities, with the Press. But you cannot diffi- help admiring the tenacity and one. single-minded application. He was the man with an obsession, and shares life. If something with the nameless forgotwith a ten people who are the real celebriin ties of the tomb, the craftsmen ob- created those marvellous objects.

ONE BIOGRAPHY OF RAY GRUNTER, BY DOS FER A MISTRA AN HAD FORGET THE BLOW TORCH, 4 FANS DEAD AWAY MEANWHILE, OVER AT DEN AGENT'S. SO, BEN, WHERE ARE THE FIST ET HONEST, FIVE CHAMERS OF THE WILSON LEFT 11 HAROLD ON THE. CA LEEK! IS THE POLITICAL BIOS GAME RuLY SO FAD air Chi- of Deep ininter- a too in this roll who Egyp- car not the a had in selfEgypt proa In- was with col- the a who STUMBLING TOWARDS THAT DREAD GARRET, HIS MIND REELING WITH RECURRING MEMORIES OF SCHOOL- MAYBE 1 CAN SAY UM IT ON THE BUS! SAY THE CAT WAS SICK 1 ON IT! OR 1 LOST MY; BIRa! On mY ETA ED.