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Kate Chopin, is now considered by some to have been a forerunner of the feminist authors of the 20th century. At Fault, set in New Orleans, is the first of her two novels.

"If ever asked to give her opinion of divorce, she might have replied that the question being one which did not immediately concern her, its remoteness had removed it from the range of her inquiry. . . . With the prejudices of her Catholic education coloring her sentiment, she instinctively shrank when the theme confronted her as one having even a remote reference to her own clean existence."

At Fault is one of the first novels in the United States to focus on the ethics of divorce. The book also covers themes of economic restructuring in the American South after the Civil War, racial tension, alcoholism and violence.

Within a decade of her death, Chopin was widely recognized as one of the leading writers of her time. In 1915, Fred Lewis Pattee wrote, "some of Chopin's] work is equal to the best that has been produced in France or even in America. She displayed] what may be described as a native aptitude for narration amounting almost to genius."