While Burroway's literary fame is due to her novels, the book that has won her the widest readership is Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft, first published in 1982.
Burroway married Belgian theatre director Walter Eysselinck and lived in Belgium for two years where she worked as a costume designer.
[when] warrior-birds swoop upon a pregnant hare, tearing out the unborn brood.”[13] That same year the first of Burroway's two children's books, The Truck on the Track, came out in England.
[15] In 2008, composer Philip Wharton set it to music for narrator and orchestra, and the piece had its debut performance with the Iowa City Symphony.
Burroway completed her fourth play, Hoddinott Veiling, in 1970; it was performed that year by ATV Network Television in London.
Another play, The Fantasy Level, was first produced in 1961 at the Yale School of Drama, and again in 1968 by the Gardner Center for the Arts for the Brighton Festival in Sussex.
And it forced me to see that if I was avoiding my real concerns and trying to write Great Literature, I would likely not be able to write.”[11] After that, Burroway looked over the books she had written and realized that the threads she consistently wove through her narrative and kept returning to—in particular, mentor relationships, the abandonment of children, race, and suicide—were in fact themes.
“That's why I began Raw Silk with, ‘This morning I abandoned my only child.’”[11] Another book of poetry, Material Goods, was published in 1980 by the University Presses of Florida.
Cutting Stone became a Book-of-the-Month Club alternate selection, and in 1993-94 Burroway was awarded the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fellowship.
By 2004, Burroway was working on another novel, Paper, which dealt with the love affair between a white woman and a black mill worker.
[9] Re-conceived and re-christened Bridge of Sand, the novel explores what happens when a white woman falls in love with a black man in the contemporary American South.
[20][21] Known for her complex female protagonists, Burroway enjoys experimenting with technique; she is adept at assuming the speech and thought patterns of characters of another gender, race, or age.
Critic Elisabeth Muhlenfeld has called her “a writer of wide range and many voices” who has “consciously avoided current trends.”[22] Author Joan Fry referred to her as “a writer’s writer, a prodigiously talented all-American girl.” Critic Thomas Rankin observed that Burroway's fiction is known for “its stylistic excellence and tragicomic tone, portraying evil as the result of emotional blindness.” He also notes that Burroway “has been called a Renaissance woman for her achievements as a novelist, teacher, playwright, [poet], columnist, and critic,” but that her most important achievement “may be the encouragement and role modeling she provides for young women who aspire to write.”[23] In 2014, she was named as the recipient of the Florida Humanities Council's 2014 Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing.