Six years ago, British writer Jane Stevenson debuted with a splendid collection of novellas, “Several Deceptions,” in which she proved eclectic in her interests, subversive in spirit and effortlessly artful in her narrative twists.

Stevenson has stayed busy since then, delivering a novel a year. But none of her books, to my mind, has quite measured up to the feisty verve of her first – until now.

“Several Deceptions” showed that Stevenson, within the space of 70 or 80 pages, could conjure worlds that felt as full-blooded and detailed as any full-length novel’s, yet were nicely taut in shape. In the three novellas of “Good Women” (Mariner, $12), she puts that same skill to optimum use.

“Light My Fire” offers a perverse mix of the lewd and the hyper-refined, as it spins a variation on the tale of Pygmalion. Narrator David Laurence, a housing renovator with a choice clientele among Scotland’s stately-home elite, is traveling by train to Edinburgh one day when he all but has public sex with the woman seated opposite him.

He and Freda embark on a frenzied affair, enjoying outdoor trysts on Scotland’s rugged coast. Eventually, they jettison their spouses (and, in David’s case, children) and move into a decrepit 16th-century fortress/farmhouse. It is here that David starts learning the truth about Freda. She has no taste – at least not according to his lights – but she is a quick, if not always willing, learner.

David, in his arrogance, is as slimy as they come. But what about Freda? She’s out of her depth, but honestly trying, even if she’s poignant in her bafflement. As David’s brother observes, she’s a “sex bomb” with the carnal and material appetites of a natural-born sensualist. But does that make her a bad person?

In “Walking with Angels,” a similar question is raised about Wenda Bootham, a Sheffield housewife in her 40s who starts seeing angels in her sitting room one day.

Soon these angels have names and are bestowing healing powers on her. A friend convinces her to set up a Web site and go into business for herself, but poor Wenda meets with resistance from her husband and her sisters at every turn. Genuinely passionate about her new spiritual interests, she turns to her angels for help. But the solutions they come up with are problematic.

“Garden Guerrillas” is the book’s piece de resistance, offering something I’ve never come across before in revenge fiction: plant life as ammunition.

Seventy-year-old widow Alice Caudwell is under pressure from her son and his pushy wife to vacate her house in London’s posh Kew neighborhood, including the garden that has been her creative palette and private world for 40 years, so the young couple can move into it with their two sons.

Alice, to put it mildly, resists. The showdown of wills that ensues makes clear the corrosive effect of skyrocketing real-estate prices on family values.

Stevenson is a truly English English writer (or Scottish, where need be), delighting in colloquial phrases and vocabulary and local references that may be a stumbling block for some U.S. readers.