The winner of numerous literary awards for her novels, and shortlisted for several more, Jane Gardam has a great affinity with the short story too, sparked off by reading Joyce's Dubliners when she was a girl.

These stories were published between 1977 and 2007, the first five of those years being a particularly fertile period for her fine, exquisitely written work. (They also feel so contemporary that the occasional reminders of their 1970s setting can call for a bit of mental readjustment.) Middle-aged by the time the first of these was published, Gardam was already a mature observer of humanity and a writer who had honed her skills to an enviable degree.

Spouses and partners are absent for a significant number of these stories - often separated, abroad or tied up at work - or else the protagonist has never made a close relationship work. These are men and women who have had to get used to working things out for themselves, and must draw on their inner resources to get by.

Gardam is confident in a range of settings. The excellent The Sidmouth Letters, in which the former student of an overbearing academic is roped into his scheme of buying up Jane Austen's love letters, couldn't be more different from tales about the Little Mermaid's sister who thinks she can do better than her older sibling, an old lady working out a complex scheme to acquire lilies for her church's Easter service or a tramp breaking into a house so he can enjoy a bath.

However, she's particularly good with the English middle class, and nowhere more deliciously than in The Tribute, when former memsahibs now living in the Home Counties meet up to pay tribute to the woman who nannied their children, completely lacking the self-awareness to realise how snobbish, patronising and demeaning they've been.

The Tribute is done for comic effect, but her critique of the suburban middle classes can be desperately sad too. In Rode By All With Pride, it's not a long-serving nanny being mourned but a teenage girl who took her own life, her parents oblivious to the pressure they were putting on her to excel.

Now 87, Gardam says she's given up writing, but this book shows an author of great skill and penetrating vision who could write about almost identical people in almost identical situations and still find the subtleties that would result in two entirely different stories.