"A Circle in the Fire" has drawn scarce critical comment as an individual story, but O'Connor's short fiction has been widely reviewed and analyzed as a whole. In the 1950s and 1960s when most of O'Connor's stories were first published, opinions of her work varied. Many critics and scholars immediately recognized that her work dealt with universal themes in a highly individual way and felt it would have lasting appeal. Others reviewers, however, criticized the stories for their grotesqueness and insisted that O'Connor was merely a regional writer of passing interest. As time has passed, respect for O'Connor's work has grown, and her early admirers have proved prescient.

In a 1965 review of O'Connor's collection Everything That Rises Must Converge, critic Irving Howe writes in the New York Review of Books that O'Connor's stories

stand securely on their own, as renderings and criticisms of human experience. And...