Literary critic and author Robert Penn Warren distinguishes between Welty's first collection, A Curtain of Green (1941) and her second, The Wide Net. Whereas the former volume exhibits "a great variety...in subject matter and method, and more particularly, in tone," the latter volume "we do not find the surprises."[2] Rather, "the stories are more nearly cut to one pattern."[3]
The stories in The Wide Net, though exhibiting impressive literary technique—"fine writing"—exhibits a subjectivism that, according to Warren, mars the material.[4] Warren cites Diana Trilling as among the critics who "were disturbed by the recent developments of Welty's work."[5] In a contemporary criticism of the collection, Trilling wrote: "Welty has developed her technical virtuosity to the point where it outweighs the uses to which it is put, and her vision to the point of nightmare."[6] Trilling's further characterized the writing in the volume as "falsely poetic," "untrue," and "insincere," a result of Welty's "extreme infusion of subjectivism and private sensibility."[7]
Novelist Elizabeth Bowen registered this comment: "One or two of the stories in her second collection, The Wide Net," made me terrified that she might be heading for esoteric incomprehensibility."[8]
In retrospective remarks on The Wide Net, Pierpont, Claudia Roth in The New Yorker wrote: "Published in 1943, to disappointing reviews, the stories are often artificial and over-literary, the work of a gifted writer clearly struggling with the burden of being an Author."[9]
