This selection of Kay Boyle's short fiction [Fifty Stories] spans almost forty years of work and is itself only the sparest sampling of her total literary production…. (p. 286)

Most typically in her stories, [Boyle] presents herself as a vitally interested witness. The events that seize her sympathies tend to be those in which social determinations collide with human hopes, rendering the latter poignant in their twisted impotence….

Boyle's fiction has an astounding variety of landscape, and especially in the rural countryside, whether French, Austrian or British, her stories seem to be comfortably at home. In general, although her European villagers receive a national or ethnic distinctiveness largely through commonplace details of language, custom and their attitudes toward their neighbors and enemies, the sense of a permanently rooted connection between them and the ageless life of the land (weather, topography, seasons, crops) is consistently and surely evoked. In fact, it seems to me that this aspect of her fiction—the unsentimental delineation of a solid, sometimes sullen momentum of traditional folk life—is the strongest achievement in Boyle's work. That twentieth-century technology has doomed what centuries labored to create—and this, with or without extraordinary political upheavals—provides a constant undercurrent of irony and pathos to the individual fate of Boyle's characters.

But what one misses in Boyle's fiction—and it may be her most salient deficiency as a writer—is a consistent recognizable emotional landscape, a steady personal viewing center which might impart a distinctive style or tone or perspective to her stories…. In Boyle's work,… the writer or the narrator/persona tends to take the role of impersonal reporter, and the stories, more frequently than not, become twisted into well-meaning but finally unpersuasive and melodramatic contortions.

A steady passionate concern for social justice and an equally unswerving compassion for the poignancies of human suffering are powerful and noble weapons in any artist's arsenal—and to these Kay Boyle can justly lay claim. Further, she has learned her craft and each story gives evidence of a concern for structure and an attempt to make language define with accuracy and resonate with feeling. And yet, too frequently, the passion and the compassion tend to become the predetermined goals of the stories. Without an emotional landscape in which the contrarieties of desire and revulsion can find resolution in the ambiguous responses of the human heart, the noblest of sentiments seem overly strident and mechanically forced. Thus, one ought to recognize the diligence, the persistent quality of caring and the integrity of a long lifetime of work as Boyle's distinguished achievement. And if she is finally a minor writer among her gifted contemporaries, she has never been self-serving or cheap. (p. 287)