Kay Boyle's story "Astronomer's Wife" is a brief exploration of a woman's dissatisfaction with her husband and her life. The 1936 collection in which the story appeared, The White Horses of Vienna and Other Stories, was hailed almost unanimously by critics as a masterpiece and as evidence of an artist at the height of her powers, and the story demonstrates Boyle's maturity and subtlety as a writer. The protagonist, identified only as Mrs. Ames, is transformed in a small but profound way by her encounter with the plumber who comes to fix her house's clogged drain. The ordinariness and unremarkable nature of the action, and its deep emotional resonance, have deep similarities to the Joycean "epiphany" form of fiction while being at the same time striking in their originality.