BOOK REVIEW : Rediscovering a Champion of Feminism : KATE CHOPIN <i> by Emily Toth</i> ; William Morrow; $24.95, 480 pages : A VOCATION AND A VOICE <i> by Kate Chopin</i> ; Penguin; $5.95, 201 pages

If Kate Chopin hadn’t existed, feminist scholars might have been tempted to invent her. A St. Louis belle, willful, resourceful, witty and uncommonly striking, she married a Louisiana man in 1870 and, after an extended European honeymoon, settled in New Orleans. There she astonished conservative local society by exploring the city unchaperoned, drinking spirits at soirees and speaking her mind in public--in short, by behaving less like a bride than a groom.

When Oscar Chopin’s thriving cotton factoring business failed, he moved his family to the tiny town of Cloutierville in northwest Louisiana. According to Emily Toth in her biography “Kate Chopin,” the Saint Louis transplant dazzled the locals with her plumed hats and pastel riding habits, scandalized them by showing her ankles, and stunned them by smoking cigarettes. Her only daughter (after five sons) was born there.

After Oscar died of malaria, Kate stayed on for two years, managing the plantation, tending the store and conducting a clandestine, but by no means unnoticed, romance with a married neighbor. Ending the illicit relationship as capriciously as she’d begun it, Kate Chopin packed up her six children and returned to her mother’s house in St. Louis in 1884.

Chopin asserted herself for a second time by becoming a writer. Although her first bland romances aroused little interest, the later stories of Louisiana rural life found an enthusiastic following. Enlivened by folklore and quaint Creole dialect, filled with characters who seemed both primitive and exotic to bourgeois St. Louis, these “Bayou Tales” were an unqualified success.

But when Chopin moved on to a more sophisticated technique and subtler themes in her next collection, her admirers were puzzled and disappointed. They had hoped for more tales of picturesque yokels, loyal domestics and aristocratic planters, but she betrayed them by presenting bleak and unsettling vignettes of disenchantment, disillusion, illness and death, few of which ended definitively.

Happily, Vogue magazine was receptive to these delicate but suggestive tales that hinted at the secret lives of outwardly conventional women. The editors published several. Emboldened, Chopin wrote a more explicit novel, “The Awakening,” in which she confronted the still-unmentionable subject of women’s sexual nature; her heroine found marriage and motherhood stultifying and yearned for independence, artistic achievement and passion. Savaged by prudish reviewers, “The Awakening” sank from sight, and when Chopin offered her third short story collection to her publisher, he rejected it out of hand.

Eventually, she found a less timid champion in William Marion Reedy, who had already published Oscar Wilde and Theodore Dreiser. Chopin’s reputation bloomed again, although briefly. She wasn’t rediscovered until the 1960s, when a Norwegian scholar edited Chopin’s complete works and presented the emerging feminist literary movement with a perfect paradigm of 19th-Century womanhood emerging from the confines of her “sphere” to take her proper place in the literary pantheon.

Brief and often deliberately ambiguous, the Chopin stories collected in “A Vocation and A Voice” explore highly contemporary themes in circumlocutory phraseology. “An Egyptian Cigarette” deals with a hallucination experienced by an intrepid heroine; “Lilacs” contrasts the emotional life of cloistered nuns with the worldly routine of a visitor to the convent; “Juanita” successfully probes the complex physical attraction between two people beautiful only to each other.

Chopin was an intense writer, concerned with the mysterious workings of the heart and mind. Beneath the genteel fin de siecle mannerisms, these themes surge and erupt with surprising vigor.

The author reveals her essential preoccupations in her arresting stories, while the vast, stentorian biography, crammed with minutia, halted by exegesis and lumbered with appendixes, all but drowns the clear, distinctive voice of Chopin herself.

Next: Carolyn See reviews “Fall Quarter” by Weldon Kees (Storyline Press).