Margaret Drabble's avid readers must be very grateful to the Spanish academic José Francisco Fernández, who has gathered for publication the 14 stories she has published since 1966. Consistently skillful and engaging, the stories dwell upon themes familiar from Drabble's novels  the perils of artistic vocation and, especially, the penalties of distinction and fame, for accomplished women; the trials of living with a querulous and demanding companion (always the husband in these stories, although Drabble has said that "The Merry Widow" was actually written after the death of her mother); the combination of stern feminist values with great sensuality and delight in beauty, including one's own; and the anxieties and discoveries of aging.

In the early stories the heroines are generic and abstract, usually called "she" rather than named. But with each decade, the stories deepen in tone, are more probing about their older heroines, and become exponentially more moving and aesthetically more adventurous. The last three stories, "The Dower House at Kellynch", "Stepping Westward" and "The Caves of God", are both personal and resonantly profound, so that the emotional impact of the whole book is much greater than the sum of its parts.

In his introduction, Fernández rightly declares that Drabble's stories "constitute an essential element in understanding her work" and argues that "research on the interwoven lines, preoccupations, and topics shared between her stories and novels remains a task yet to be completed". But despite his editorial contributions, Fernández is not much help in this research. He teasingly mentions, for example, that "it is now known" that Saul Bellow wrote Drabble a nasty note about her portrayal of him as the failed seducer Howard Jago in "A Success Story", but he provides no footnote or source. I tried to track down the information and it is not known by Bellow's current biographer Zachary Leader nor the editor of his letters. To read the letter, I finally discovered online, you have to read a 2010 article by Fernández in an obscure and virtually unobtainable German literary quarterly, ZAA.

Fernández does not supply important information either about the provenance of a key story, "The Dower House at Kellynch: A Somerset Romance". I happened to be in the audience in October 1993 when Drabble read this story aloud to the Janeites at the annual conference of the Jane Austen Society of North America, in an inn on Lake Louise, in the Canadian Rockies. The set book for the conference that year was Persuasion, and Drabble's story is first of all a clever, playful and unpretentious modernisation of Jane Austen, in which a successful but lonely actress named Emma Watson falls in love with Kellynch Hall and its decaying Dower House, arranges to rent it from its absentee owner William Elliot, and has a romantic entanglement with Burgo Elliot, the heir to the estate.

Drabble had done the introductions to an edition of Austen, and the story is full of in-jokes about Persuasion, including the heroine's accident on a fossil-hunting trip to Lyme Regis; and about the Canadian Rockies (where Bill Elliot escapes to study minerals and falls in love "with the mountains and the everlasting snows"). But it is also about the heroine's fear that she herself is a fossil, who has left her "cad of a husband" but is afraid of a "second attachment". By the end of the story, Emma, flying to Calgary, is reinvigorated through immersion in the past, by the possibilities of love and discovery in the present, and feels "a sense of my own power . . . I can move mountains".

The use of romantic literature and the romantic landscape as a frame was so liberating for Drabble that the next year she used a similar device for "Stepping Westward", a story commissioned by the Wordsworth Society and read at its annual meeting in Grasmere. "Stepping Westward: A Topographical Tale" uses the British narrative paradigm of a walking (and driving) tour of literary landmarks to take the heroine, Mary Mogg, on a psychological journey (a device also recently used in a Lake District setting in Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon's TV series The Trip).

Mary is a "solitary teacher of English literature", facing retirement, and terrified of "old age, ill health, solitude" and death, as the Wordsworthian title metaphorically suggests. But on her tour she meets a wise and vigorous woman of 60, named Anne Elliot  a lichenologist, in love with eternal things but also with the present. Like John Stuart Mill, Mary is saved from her depression by Wordsworthian meditation. Although she had feared the despair of "age and enforced idleness", she sees in Elliot's radiant life that "the untravelled world still gleams".

The last story, "The Caves of God", is also a famous woman's exorcism of fear, this time of the exposure of her own wild youth by some biographer; and here too she comes to forgive herself, and to accept her own history. "All these things had been good. They were not to be buried, or despised, or forgotten. They held no shame." Although Drabble wrote relatively few short stories, she used them to explore important themes, to express her abiding love for nature, and to consider not only her place among women writers but also her heritage from the English poets; and to claim her rightful place in a writer's Britain.

Elaine Showalter's A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx is published by Virago.