Although she was a member of the famous Lost Generation of American artists and writers who inhabited Paris in the 1920s, the poet, novelist, and short story writer Kay Boyle never liked that characterization. Her writing echoes many of the themes common to such Lost Generation writers as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway—disorientation, the loss of a sense of home, alienation from one's acquaintances and family. But Boyle is different in that, unlike such writers as Hemingway and Fitzgerald, she concentrates on the double alienation of women and especially on middle-class women's difficulty in finding fulfillment.

"Astronomer's Wife" has rarely been specifically discussed by critics. However, most commentators on Boyle's work feel that the short story is her forté, and as a result they have primarily written about her mastery of the short story form, especially in this period of her life...