[2] This event, alongside a song Waller wrote years earlier about "the dreams of a woman named Francesca", gave him the idea for the novel,[2] which he completed in eleven days.

According to Marc Eliot, Waller's novella is a modernization of the Noël Coward play Still Life (1934), which was adapted into David Lean's film Brief Encounter (1945).

Klepp of Entertainment Weekly called The Bridges of Madison County "a short, poignant story, moving precisely because it has the ragged edges of reality".

[10] Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times praised the novella's "compelling" story for "elevating to a spiritual level the common fantasy, in which a virile stranger materializes in the kitchen of a quiet housewife and takes her into his arms.

[16] The musical began previews on Broadway at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre on January 17, 2014 and officially opened on February 20, 2014 with Kelli O'Hara as Francesca and Steven Pasquale as Robert Kincaid.

[21] In 2018, the Argentine theatrical director Luis "Indio" Romero directed the actors Facundo Arana and Araceli González in a Spanish version of the work.