An anonymous newspaper friend once called Kate Chopin 'a rogue in porcelain, flashing her witty, provocative and advanced opinions right into the face of Philistia'. Others noted Chopin's quiet manner and her gift for saying 'so many good and witty things'. She possessed 'every grace and talent essential to the maintenance of a brilliant social circle'. She was wise and cosmopolitan and did not make moral judgements. Nor did she force her own children, five sons and a daughter, to leave home or get jobs, and only one was married before his mother died at fifty-four. She deliberately kept a condemned book, Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure, on her parlour table so that young visitors would peruse it out of curiosity and discover that it was 'unpardonably dull; and immoral, chiefly because it is not true' (714). Real life and mixed emotions were much more interesting to her than Hardy's melancholy story. According to her daughter, Chopin had a 'habit of looking on the amusing side of everything', but also 'rather a sad nature'. She knew that life has both beauty and brutality - and she also knew how to keep secrets. The facts of Kate O'Flaherty Chopin's life are well known. Although her tombstone lists her birthdate as 1851, her baptismal record shows that she was born on 8 February 1850, in St Louis, Missouri. She was the second child and first daughter of Eliza Faris O'Flaherty, twenty-two, whose husband was Thomas O'Flaherty, forty-five, an Irish immigrant and wealthy businessman who owned four household slaves. Kate had an older brother, an older halfbrother and two little sisters who died young, which may be why, at five, she was sent to boarding school at the Sacred Heart Academy.