The portrait of the permissive era that emerges from these stories is a rather somber one. Eros is less the bringer of carnal fun than a dark and rather dangerous force on which men and women (but mostly women) pin their romantic hopes at their peril. Hazzard’s female characters are not constrained by conventional sexual morality, inasmuch as they engage in premarital and extramarital sex without compunction or shame, but they evince none of the antic libertinism or experience-gathering curiosity of, say, Mary McCarthy’s women. Sex remains for them a solemn rite, a significant act of surrender, and their inability to divorce the act from higher feeling leaves them horribly vulnerable to the emotional sadism and moral carelessness of men.

In Hazzard’s later novels, her noble characters are ultimately rewarded for their integrity: they get to walk out of their soul-crushing jobs, to thumb their noses at the insufferable snobs who have oppressed them, to find enduring love with their Platonic other halves. In these stories, the pure of heart are largely denied such satisfactions. They remain chained up in their grim offices, or else they get sacked; the people they fall in love with don’t requite their love, or aren’t worthy of their love; the people who love them, they don’t want. What few glimpses of romantic fulfillment Hazzard affords us are either in rear view, or from a distance: a woman grieving a dead husband in “Cliffs of Fall,” two lovestruck Norwegian travelers seen on a ferry in “Out of Itea.” (“But what will they eat?” “Tomatoes.” “Where will they sleep?” “Together.”)

To the extent that these stories withhold earthly satisfaction from their romantics, they might reasonably be described as austere, or even bleak: “Il est plus facile de mourir que d’aimer” is the line that one unhappy wife in “The Worst Moment of the Day” happens upon in a book of Louis Aragon’s poetry. Yet, these stories insist, to be open to the difficulty and pain of love is better than to be comfortably protected from its sting. Hazzard’s seekers of truth and beauty may suffer, but, as one wise character remarks, “We should remember that sorrow does produce flowers of its own. It is a misunderstanding always to look for joy.”

CLIFFS OF FALL

THE PARTY

The Fergusons’ door opened on a burst of light and voices, and on Evie’s squeal of surprise—quite as if, Minna thought, we had turned up uninvited. Evie kissed her.

“Our shoes are a bit wet,” said Theodore. He stood aside to let Minna enter. “Is that all right?”