Although Berriault's career had spanned almost four decades and led to the creation of short stories as well as novels, Berriault's work has never received a great deal of critical attention. Nonetheless, her fiction is generally recognized as powerful, realistic, and unsentimental, often focusing on a crisis situation in which characters are unable to break free from their loneliness and despair. Julia B. Boken, writing in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, compares Berriault's fiction to that of Russian writers Leo Tolstoy, Fyodyor Dostoyevsky, and Anton Chekov because of her "probing [of] the human psyche."

"The Stone Boy" is one of Berriault's better known and frequently anthologized pieces of short fiction. It first appeared in Mademoiselle in 1957, and eight years later it was included in Berriault's first collection of short stories, The Mistress, and Other Stories. It was also included in Berriault's next published collection, The Infinite...