Hazzard disdained the tendency toward a conversational, plain-spoken style in modern fiction. It seemed to her a perverse rejection of art’s proper aspiration to beauty. (Writers, she told The Paris Review in 2005, had abandoned “the power of formal language” in favor of trying “to seem casual, sassy, democratic, ‘young.’”) In Hazzard’s work, beauty in whatever form—a sentence, or a table setting—has a moral value. Demotic idiom rarely appears in these stories, even in the mouths of her protagonists, and when someone does use ugly slang or jargon—when, for example, a woman worries an acquaintance will find her “a bit dykey,” or a man says “utilize” instead of “use”—it almost always denotes a certain crudeness of character. (By the same token, caring about and quoting poetry is a reliable indicator of virtue—the equivalent of riding into town wearing a white cowboy hat.)

Much of the drama in Hazzard’s work arises from the bruising interactions between those who are responsive to beauty, and those who are not. Her heroes and heroines are modern romantics who cleave to high feeling and high seriousness in a world largely hostile to their idealism. (“One said ‘relationship’ nowadays about those one loved,” a gloomy bureaucrat muses in “Official Life.”) Her villains are pragmatists and philistines who want at all costs to “keep the poetry separate.” The puzzlement and condescension that Hazzard’s high-minded characters inspire as they make their pilgrim’s progress through twentieth-century life supply the comedy of these stories. The sufferings they endure for their romantic integrity supply the tragedy. Here is Nettie, the teenage protagonist of “A Place in the Country,” responding to the news that her married lover is abandoning her.

Nothing could convince her that this first sharing of her secret existence, more significant even than the offering of her person, represented less than it appeared to. That circumstances might oblige him to withdraw from her she perfectly understood; that he actually felt himself to be less committed appalled her. It confounded all her assumptions, that something so deeply attested should prove totally unpredictable.

This is rather how one might expect George Eliot’s Dorothea Brooke to sound, were she to be spirited out of Victorian England and given contraception and an apartment. Nettie is not nearly as clever, or as reliably high-minded, as Dorothea. (In a later story, we meet her again, in early middle age, and discover that she has grown up to become a slightly silly person.) Yet in the moment of Nettie’s earnest adolescent heartbreak, Hazzard endows her with something approaching nobility. Urged by her sheepish lover not to “exaggerate the importance” of her broken heart, she understands instinctively that the greater sin is to take matters of the heart lightly.