Barnhisel holds a Ph.D. in English and American literature and currently teaches writing at Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas. He has published articles on such writers as Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. In the following essay, he examines the wife's awakening and reconnection to the physical in "Astronomer's Wife."

Kay Boyle is a writer whose reputation has never been fixed. Critics through the years have been unable to come to a consensus about whether Boyle should be considered a classic writer or simply a minor, if talented, author of middlebrow novels and stories. Part of the problem is that she was associated with many groups and movements but considered herself a member of none of them. She is primarily identified with the famous Lost Generation of American writers in Paris in the 1920s but disliked the designation. Many of her stories have a strong feminist...