[In the following review, the critic offers a positive assessment of The Astronomer and Other Stories.]

In this collection of seven stories and a novella, Mrs. Betts once again reveals those qualifications which place her among the finest writers of contemporary fiction. For, as in her previous short stories and novels, she continues to demonstrate not only her great powers of observation and imagination, her feeling for time, place, and character, but also a wonderful sense of form and structure without which writers seldom achieve lasting distinction in their creative work. In the novella, The Astronomer (the title piece and three times longer than any other selection) Mrs. Betts introduces an originality, a depth and richness of content, not possible in shorter pieces. In this beautifully structured narrative in which the relationship between an elderly man retired from the world and a young couple who bring him back into it develops into a story of absorbing interest, Mrs. Betts explores or touches on many themes: the loneliness of old age, the nature of love, the problem of forgiveness, even the relative importance of Biblical and classical reference as a guide to conduct in our own time. If Mrs. Betts's shorter pieces are less original and provocative, they are just as carefully wrought. With one exception the background of stories and novella is the small-town South which Mrs. Betts knows so well both as geography and as state of mind and treats with such understanding and affection. For those who enjoy the best in short fiction this collection is highly recommended.