Much more twisted than she first seems

Jane Gardam has the Austenesque quality of being satisfying and disquieting, conventional and experimental, and is much more artful than she appears.

For much of her career, Jane Gardam has been compared to that other Jane, whose inch of ivory has proved such a resilient myth. Like Austen, Gardam is a great deal more than she may first appear, both as a writer of short stories and as a novelist.

These collected stories, chosen by the author, come after Gardam was the only British writer selected for this year's Folio Prize, and they give some measure of her range. Many have links with the Far East, especially Hong Kong, where her greatest creation, the barrister Old Filth (Failed In London Try Hong Kong) and subject of her three latest novels, gained his fortune and lost his heart. However, the huge cast that peoples her imagination includes tramps, ghosts and monsters. These are, above all, stories of the kind that one has almost given up hope of encountering in the 21st century - funny, affecting, beautiful and with a twist at the end that makes them powerful cocktails in the literary cabinet.

Gardam is easily the equal of Katherine Mansfield and Alice Munro, but strangely obscure in her homeland of Britain, despite winning the Costa/Whitbread prize twice, being short-listed for the Booker and the Orange and holding the Heywood Hill Prize for a lifetime contribution to the enjoyment of literature. Perhaps it is because she has the Austenesque quality of being satisfying and disquieting, conventional and experimental, and is much more artful than she appears.

One of the stories in this collection is, in fact, about Austen. The narrator is inveigled by a grasping American academic into a pre-emptive purchase of letters, possibly written by Austen to the mysterious man said by her sister, Cassandra Austen, to have been worthy of Jane. Such a discovery would be sensational. Little does the academic, a much-married fortune-hunter and plagiarist, know that the letters belong, in fact, in the narrator's own family - never opened but unmistakably authentic. She has a moral choice, respecting not only her own background but the women the academic has relentlessly exploited.

What she does is both heartbreaking and right.

Gardam's style is part of her hypnotic ability to make you believe that what she tells us is true. Conversational, lucid, realist yet fantastical, she can be outrageously funny, gradually revealing her characters by what is not said, and not seen. The elderly ladies in The Tribute, gathering to commemorate poor Dench, their former nanny, seem engaging at first, but their exploitation of a heroic servant is increasingly repulsive.

Equally haunting is Rode By All With Pride, a story about a Wimbledon couple who, being Oxbridge-educated and serenely certain that their only child will follow their own privileged path, get the worst news possible.

Some of the funniest stories remind us that the author also writes for children. The animals in The Zoo At Christmas speak to each other, but their conversation is far more odd than we might like to believe. The Little Mermaid has her feminist furies stoked by experience, though her Sea King father remarks dryly: "It is a mistake to base a whole philosophy of life upon one disappointment."

Not every story is as top-notch as these and in selecting some of her own favourites Gardam loses the satisfaction of the interlinked characters in her collection Black Faces, White Faces. Yet those that are here give a flavour of her brilliance, originality and wit.

She shows us that what matters in life is kindness, imagination, community and work.

The Stories by Jane Gardam (Little, Brown $49.99)

- Independent