Lettie Ransley of The Guardian called it "as big, rich and complex as one might expect" and wrote,The Volcano Lover is a powerful, intricate novel of ideas: frequently inflected with Sontag's feminism, it applies a modern lens to the Enlightenment's moral, social and aesthetic concerns.

Yet it is also a tender inventory of desire: intricately mapping the modulation from the cold mania of the collector to the lover's passion.

[1]The writer John Banville praised the work, noting that Sontag's decision to write a romantic historical novel was "a surprise."

He remarked, "The Volcano Lover, despite a few nods of acknowledgment toward post-modernist self-awareness, is a big, old-fashioned broth of a book.

"[2] Candia McWilliam of The Independent lauded the book, opining:In The Volcano Lover height and control are buoyed up by clear thinking; although it descants, sometimes at essay length, upon abstractions, there is no 'cabinet of curiosities' disjunction between rumination and fiction such as decks so many modern novels in fustian.