Fifty Stories (1981) is a collection of fifty of Boyle's best and most representative stories. Boyle's writing career was long and varied, and this anthology gives readers a glimpse of how this master of the short story developed her talents over time.

Plagued by the Nightingale (1931) was Boyle's first novel. In it, she examines the cultural conflicts between an American woman and the Frenchman she marries when the woman returns to France with her husband.

Another portrait of a woman trapped in a stifling marriage, more extreme than that in "Astronomer's Wife," can be found in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's classic story "The Yellow Wallpaper," which was first published in 1892. In Gilman's story, a woman who is suffering from postpartum depression is given a "rest cure" by her husband. This cure forbids that she undertake any activity whatsoever, including the outlet that...