Astley has a significant place in Australian letters as she was "the only woman novelist of her generation to have won early success and published consistently throughout the 1960s and 1970s, when the literary world was heavily male-dominated".

[3] Wyndham writes that "in person and in print, the chain-smoking Astley was unsentimental, wickedly funny and yet had a deep kindness and a loathing of injustice towards Aborigines, underdogs and misfits".

[7] He associated her with writers such as Patrick White and Hal Porter who wrote "poetic prose ... an important but by no means popular dimension to Australian fiction".

According to the AustLit Gateway News Astley was "revered for her meticulous and controlled use of language and her portrayals of the Queensland landscape and character, [and] was renowned for her quick wit, raspy voice, and ever-present cigarettes".

In an interview with Candida Baker, Astley quotes Helen Garner as saying "I simply hate her style"[11] and goes on to say "I can't resist using imagistic language.

[7] Despite tepid reception among some, there were also many who admired Astley's writing for both its style and for the subject matter, such as writer Kerryn Goldsworthy, who was quoted as saying, "I love its densely woven grammar, its ingrained humour, its uncompromising politics, and its undimmed outrage at human folly, stupidity and greed".

[13] Goldsworthy continues to say that "her body of work [over four decades] adds up to a protracted study in the way that full-scale violence and tragedy can flower extravagantly from the withered seeds of malice and resentment ...

The perps in Drylands are all her usual suspects: racists, developers, hypocritical gung-ho civic do-gooders, and assorted unreconstructed male-supremacist swine".

[13] Academic and literary editor, Delys Bird, summarises the author's themes as follows: "Astley's novels and stories typically present a sceptical view of social relationships among ordinary people, one often coloured by her former Catholicism, and directed through the struggles of her self-conscious protagonists to find an expressive space within their uncongenial surroundings".

Leigh Dale writes that A Kindness Cup "focuses on the massacre of a group of Aborigines and the efforts made to forget and to remember this violence at a town reunion twenty years later, is marked largely by the rage and frustration felt by its central character who seems to mirror Astley's horror at the genial amorality that pervades some rural communities.