In After You've Gone, Alice Adams' tenth book of fiction, the typical character is an intelligent, career-minded woman whose personal history includes a series of failed relationships with men. Her heroines tend to hold feminist ideals—generally they are self-supporting, intellectually autonomous, and politically liberal—but fail to practice these ideals when choosing and relating to their male partners.

As the title of a recent bestselling self-help book would have it, they're smart women who make foolish choices. (The first clue to their emotional dependency, at times verging on desperation, is in the volume's title, which suggests wistful melancholy rather than jubilant independence.) The title story is representative: a successful lawyer has been abandoned by her handsome lover (a charismatic poet whom she has supported financially) in favor of a younger woman. An epistolary letter addressed to the poet but probably never mailed, "After You've Gone" is both sarcastic and affectionate, embittered and fair-minded. But if the woman's recollections and present resolve to do better suggest her intelligence and renewed self-esteem (she has since become involved with another man—"a more known quality than you were," she tells her former lover), they also betray her lingering investment in the past relationship.

Similarly, the heroine of "On the Road," Brendan Hollowel, is a renowned scholar trapped in a loveless marriage to a Washington attorney. The story follows Brendan through one of her lecture tours, during which she is approached by a handsome stranger. She rebuffs him, but then finds herself "headed for the elevator, hurrying like a schoolgirl, or some classically frustrated, quite deranged spinster lady." Seeking solace in sisterhood, she discovers that her friendships with women are charged with negative rather than positive energy. "Aren't women supposed to be nicer to each other these days?" she asks herself in despair. "To be less rather than more competitive? In a discouraged way she decides that in some instances, at least, the grounds for competition have simply shifted, if ever so slightly." Like several others in this volume, this story seems to stop rather than end, with Brendan's conflicts still unresolved, her life quite likely to continue in the same melancholy groove.

Not all of Adams' stories feature such grim portrayals. In "Favors" a young woman who has recently entered a rash marriage takes a step toward maturity through getting to know an elderly but fiercely committed political activist. And "Tide Pools" describes the nurturing reunion of two girlhood friends. Judith is a cautious, self-sufficient woman, a divorced college professor living alone, yet she renews her childhood affection for the ebullient Jennifer, whose subsequent life has been marked by several failed marriages and a dependence on alcohol. As adults, the two women support but do not judge one another, and by the end of the story Judith can say, "all things considered, even living alone, I really feel better and better . . . , and I think I have never been so happy in my life."

Although love generally brings to Adams' women the "Deep, irremediable scars" mentioned on the last page of "A Sixties Romance," it also deepens their self-awareness and leads to a self-sufficient, if emotionally brittle, maturity. These women combine fragility and strength, and their emotional hesitations are effectively suggested by the author's prose style, which is both deft and delicate, ironic and questioning. With its numerous intelligent but melancholy ladies, and its equally numerous handsome heels to whom they seem in thrall, After You've Gone might well displease the most militant fringes of feminist criticism; but it's an honest, wise, and finely written book.