Though the narrator is never explicitly given a gender, it is widely assumed to be a woman and perhaps Chopin herself. Chopin’s fictional works usually share similarities to her real life and have many autobiographical elements. For example, they are often set in Louisiana, where she lived with her husband, and her stories commonly reflect her Creole heritage. The nature of 19th-century womanhood was one of the biggest themes in Chopin’s works. Her most famous work, The Awakening (1899), is acclaimed as one of the prototypical works in the American feminist canon.

By the time Chopin was writing, the first wave of feminism was underway in the United States. The suffrage movement had been active since the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, and women activists were advocating for property and economic rights. Still, women thinkers and writers weren’t always given proper acclaim or credit. Chopin faced extensive backlash for The Awakening because it explored ideas like female sexuality and oppression, and the book fell out of print. It wasn’t until the 1960s when there was increased interest in women’s studies and women’s liberation that Chopin’s work became firmly established in the American literary canon.

“The Night Came Slowly” does not have the same explicit feminist themes as some of Chopin’s longer works.