A Rediscovered Kate Chopin Short Story

We wish to share news of recovering the printed text of Kate Chopin’s “Her First Party,” which first appeared in the Youth’s Companion, 30 March 1905. Chopin had alternately titled the manuscript “Millie’s First Party” and “Millie’s First Ball” in her Account and Memoranda Notebooks.

“Her First Party” appears as a Reprint Feature in the December 2013 issue of Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers, Volume 30, Number 2. It is accompanied by our critical essay, which attempts to reconstruct editorial publishing history at the fin de siècle in hopes of understanding why the Youth’s Companion may have held Chopin’s manuscript so long that the story appeared seven months after her death.

You can read Kate Chopin’s “Her First Party” in a PDF. The story appeared in Youth’s Companion on 30 March 1905 (Volume 79, Issue 13).

You can find out when Kate Chopin wrote each of her short stories and when and where each was first published.