Literary fame—like every kind I suppose—is not necessarily proportional to the worth of the work, and therefore the name of Elizabeth Berridge (1919-2009) is not as widely known as it might be. Observing the small change of life with minute attention, and extracting from it all its significance in prose of exemplary precision, she combined dispassion with compassion, while avoiding cynicism and sentimentality.

Most writers’ first efforts are autobiographical, or at least partly so, and this was true of Berridge’s first short story, The Hard and the Human, published in 1947 as part of a collection of short stories. …