The critical response to Mary Lavin's short fiction has been overwhelmingly positive. A group of her stories, including “In the Middle of the Fields,” published in the late 1960s and gathered together in the third volume of The Stories of Mary Lavin, has been singled out as among her finest. In his review of this volume, Richard F. Peterson notes that these stories are most often referred to as her “widow stories.” He writes that they “represent a major phase in Mary Lavin's career in which she added new power and control to her fiction by occasionally dramatizing her painful adjustment to widowhood.” Peterson cites the “powerful influence of memory on the emotions of Mary Lavin's widows, especially in preserving the pleasure of married life and the pain of loss.”

Reva Brown, in her review of the same volume of Lavin's stories, considers the author to...