It’s been almost 30 years since Laurie Colwin died of a heart attack at 48, and her books are ripe for rediscovery. I’ve thought of her often during the past year, wondering what she would have made of the pandemic. She’s best remembered for her delectable food books, Home Cooking and More Home Cooking, which include such quarantine-friendly chapters as “Bread Baking Without Agony” and “Easy Cooking for Exhausted People.” (We can save “The Once and Future Dinner Party” for later.)

But her smart, witty fiction is also deeply concerned with food and domestic life in general; she loves to describe her characters’ living rooms and china patterns, what they wear and what they eat, the music they listen to and the books they read—her work makes the case that objects shed light on their owners. As she wrote in a story called “The Lone Pilgrim”: “Oh, domesticity! The wonder of dinner plates and cream pitchers. You know your friends by their ornaments. You want everything. If Mrs. A. has her mama’s old jelly mold, you want one, too, and everything that goes with it—the family, the tradition, the years of having jelly molded in it.” (Colwin had a delightful fondness for exclamations: A story called “My Mistress” ends, “Oh, art! Oh, memory!”)

Colwin’s books have been divided between two publishers, Vintage and Harper Perennial, which are now doing an unusual joint repackaging of all 10 of them. The program began in February with Happy All the Time—which has a new introduction by Katherine Heiny, whose recent novel, Early Morning Riser (Knopf, April 13), I highly recommend—and will continue until both volumes of Home Cooking appear on Oct. 12, with introductions by Ruth Reichl and Deb Perelman.

Though her titles include Another Marvelous Thing and Family Happiness, Colwin’s characters are not, of course, happy all the time—the books would be pretty thin if they were. Their problems are always emotional, though, and never practical. How do they support themselves? They might run their family’s charitable art foundation or practice law; when Elizabeth Bax, the heroine of Shine On, Bright Dangerous Object, is widowed at 27, she tells her brother-in-law, Patrick, that she doesn’t want his late brother’s inheritance, saying, “I have some money of my own, and I can work.” Nothing to worry about! Elizabeth and Patrick fall in love, and that’s a situation Colwin can dig her teeth into. 

Another Marvelous Thing is a novel in stories recounting an affair between Francis Clemens and Josephine “Billy” Delielle. It begins with “My Mistress,” told from Francis’ perspective: “My wife is precise, elegant, and well-dressed, but the sloppiness of my mistress knows few bounds.” Colwin excels at prickly women like Billy, who doesn’t care about her appearance or—perhaps alone among Colwin’s characters—her surroundings but does care about intelligence and personal chemistry.

There are love affairs and friendships, stiff new marriages and comfortable old ones. There are new babies but no teenagers—I wish Colwin had lived long enough to tackle teenagers! As I reread the books today, they seem to come from another world, and I don’t mean 1970s and ’80s New York—more like Jane Austen’s England. The people are all rich and White and seem to float through life on a cushion of privilege, with all the time in the world to attend to their emotional turmoil. Colwin ignores the traditional writing-school advice to show, not tell: She talks to her readers, describing her characters from the outside in. This would make her fiction perfect for the audiobook format, but only Happy All the Time is available. Maybe that could come next, Vintage and Harper?

Laurie Muchnick is the fiction editor.