She infiltrated the exclusively male domains of politics and journalism by hiding her intelligence and drive behind a façade of cheerful, irreverent innocence—playing the role men expected of bright, pretty girls in 1941.

In 2009, The Wall Street Journal published a retrospective by National Public Radio commentator Scott Simon in which he called Anna Hastings "both an unsparing and sympathetic portrait of a newspaperwoman when they were rare and often maligned.

This supposition resurfaces occasionally, as when Roger Kaplan, writing for the Policy Review in 1999,[4] called Anna Hastings a "transparent attack," adding: Though [Drury] never lost his talent for spinning a good yarn, drawing amusing, likable, admirable, and detestable characters in great quantity ... His demolition of The Washington Post and the vices he considered to have seeped into the craft of political journalism in America [in] Anna Hastings is incomprehensible to anyone not familiar with the evolution of the American media, and particularly the Washington media, in the past generation.

Though Allen Drury portrayed equal rights for all Americans, including women, as an essential political goal in all of his novels, he was of a generation that came of age in the 1930s and his language can sound condescending to modern sensibilities.

He quoted Allen Drury's dedication of Anna Hastings as illustrative of his point: Dedicated to all those vigorous, determined, indomitable, and sometimes a wee bit ruthless Bettys, Barbaras, Helens, Nancys, Kays, Marys, Lizes, Deenas, Dorises, Mays, Sarahs, Evelyns, Mariannes, Clares, Frans, Naomis, Miriams, Maxines, Bonnies and the rest, who never cease to amuse, annoy and quite often out scoop their male colleagues of the Washington press corps.