Tessa Hadley's short stories are set in a carefully delineated contemporary landscape  complete with Facebook, MP3 players and mobile phones, and in the background such current world events as the war in Afghanistan  yet they have a definite hint of the 19th century about them. Her prose style is delicate, restrained, sometimes erring on the side of formality; her narratives chart upheavals of the heart with earnest attention to psychological development. The world she writes about is ethnically homogenous but social distinctions are microscopically observed.

The posher characters in Married Love, her second collection of stories, have names such as Lottie, Ally and Em. They decorate their bedrooms with Hammershoi reproductions and photos of cave paintings, attend writers' retreats and are quite likely to play a musical instrument. The less well-to-do characters are called things such as Pam, Shelley and Roxanne; they smoke Embassy Regals, attach pine air fresheners to the rear-view mirrors of their cars and have husbands who sit around all day in front of the telly. Regardless of their class or background, however, all of Hadley's characters speak in beautifully constructed sentences and think fine, expansive thoughts.

Such a rarefied approach to narrative may well put some readers off. Too bad for them. Hadley is a writer of exceptional intelligence and skill and, for all the apparent conventionality of her vision, hers is a subtly subversive talent.

Like Alan Hollinghurst (though somewhat less emphatically), she brings a neo-Jamesian sensibility to bear on sexy, distinctly un-Jamesian subject matter; some of the sharpest lines in Married Love occur when she traces the emotional and psychological effects of sensual activity. After sex, one character is "returned too soon into her own possession" when her lover falls asleep; another, taking a line of cocaine, feels herself "densely concentrated in the present". These are precisely evocative descriptions of states that were, for one reason or another, either out of reach or out of bounds to the late Victorian authors whose prose Hadley's so often seems to emulate.

But even when she is writing about less obviously modern situations, Hadley pays the kind of attention to her characters' lives that means she can always find something new to see.

The title story of this collection sets out from a familiar premise: an undergraduate announces to her parents that she is having an affair with one of her lecturers and that she is going to marry him. But where many short story writers might leave it at that  merely describing the ensuing clash between the outraged protective instincts of the parents and the outraged self-belief of the girl  Hadley follows her protagonist into her marriage, tracing the slow rot of her potential and her pluckiness, her journey from a person with "a gift for vehemence" to one who speaks with emotion "only about her children and about money". Yet Hadley never allows the love her protagonist feels for her much older husband to die altogether; the effect is to uncover new layers of complexity in a well-worn fictional trope.

Similarly, in "The Godchildren", two men and a woman, all in their early 50s, meet for the first time since childhood to collect their inheritance from their late godmother. As they wander around her house, their memories of it, and of her, and of each other, contrast and rub up against one another. The scenario (a reunion of childhood friends well into middle age) is hardly new, but Hadley imbues it with a powerful sense of the sadness of vanished loyalties and missed opportunities.

Only Alice Munro and Colm Tóibín, among all the working short story writers I'm aware of, are so adept at portraying whole lives in a few thousand words. With Married Love, Hadley joins their company as one of the most clear-sighted chroniclers of contemporary emotional journeys. She is not an innovative writer, perhaps, but she excites nevertheless in the freshness and variety of her perceptions, the way she uses established techniques to tell us urgent truths about the here and now.

Tessa Hadley's previous novel, The London Train, featured a scene in which the male protagonist considers the stack of reading material on his wife's side of the bed: "Novels which seemed to him pretty interchangeable  what people called 'women's fiction'." A volume of short stories called Married Love might seem to belong in the same pile; though if Hadley writes within a domestic frame, she is also a colourful ironist who may be the most perceptive chronicler since George Eliot of avid, unworldly young women with an enormous Casaubon complex.

In The London Train, Cora, an idealistic English teacher, sacrifices herself to a senior civil servant: "She imagined herself in a continuum with the serious, passionate women whose weddings she read about in novels: Kitty in Anna Karenina, Anna Brangwen in The Rainbow. She was twenty three." And it happens again in the title story of the new collection, in which Lottie, a 19-year-old music student, announces at the breakfast table that she plans to marry her professor.

Lottie is an archetypal misfit: "just over five feet tall with a tight little figure and a barrel chest", who still affects pigtails and the plastic NHS specs she picked out as a child. To her parents' horror, she has betrothed herself to Edgar Lennox, a churchy academic who composes anthems for the cathedral choir. There is a minor problem: Edgar is already married. (Also a potentially major one  he seems to have a history of making unsuitable proposals to talented young students.) Yet even the bride's mother eventually comes round to the idea of having a senior citizen for a son-in-law: "He seemed to represent the ideal of an elderly creative artist: tall, very thin, with a shock of upstanding white hair, a face whose hollows seemed to have been carved out by suffering, tanned skin as soft as leather, a charcoal grey linen shirt."

Hadley sprinkles intimations of disaster at a thinly attended reception where the age difference between the partners becomes painfully apparent: "After the drink ran out and the students melted away, too much dispiriting white hair seemed to show up in the knots of guests remaining, like snow in the flower beds." And having produced three daughters in quick succession, Edgar soon retreats to the peace and quiet of his former home. Gradually it begins to dawn that it may have been his aggressively proprietorial ex-wife "who was behind the charcoal linen shirts, the silk suits, the whole production of Edgar as exceptional and distinguished".

Hadley's stories frequently manage to compress a novel's-worth of development into 20-odd pages without seeming rushed or to be merely skimming the surface. The protagonists are thoughtfully developed and minor characters often illuminated with a single, incisive detail: you only need to be told that Pam "always drove with the interior light on; she treated her car like just another room in the house" to have a pretty clear idea who Pam might be. And whereas some story collections have the stop-start quality of slow-moving traffic, Hadley's get straight into gear: "It's an April morning and a young man waits at a black-painted front door in a decent street in Tynemouth"; "The three heirs, in three separate taxis, converged on 33 Everdene Walk on a fine afternoon in late May"; and, best of all: "Albert Arno, the film-director, dropped dead at his home in the middle of a sentence."

There's also the delicately observed tristesse of a tale entitled "In the Cave", which begins: "After the sex, he fell asleep." Linda, a middle-aged divorcee, goes on a blind date with an expert in the prehistoric paintings at Lascaux. She is initially fascinated by his theory that "for the people who painted Lascaux, the rock face may have seemed only a skin stretched between them and another order of reality". Yet it is not the perfunctory sex that lets things down so much as his casual admission that the cave-dwellers may have been deceiving themselves in their belief in the numinous. "'How small,' Linda reflects. 'Just that. One of those tiny twitches in conversation that, unbeknownst to the speaker, tear fissures in the moment out of which power and pleasure drain.'" It's these unexpected gaps in the surface of things which Hadley's stories unerringly reveal. And it's also worth considering that the prehistoric images of hunting and gathering can be seen as a record of the cave-dweller's daily grind. Perhaps we should credit them with the invention of domestic fiction.