At times, especially early, in “Elements of Style” (Knopf, 320 pages, $23.95), a comedy of manners set in uptown Manhattan, a reader could be forgiven for thinking she’s stumbled into a Candace Bushnell novel, or one of those romans a clef penned by a pair of well-connected friends who met at Spence. A character ponders where her family should vacation for Christmas: Nevis would be nice, but her husband refuses to lease a private plane, and flying commercial after the terrorist attacks of September 11 is so impossible.

But just when “Elements of Style,” the first novel by the prize-winning playwright Wendy Wasserstein, who died in January at 55, threatens to become too Bushnell-esque, the narrative returns to its central and most fully human character – who is, as in much of Wasserstein’s work, a sort of stand-in for the author. Frankie Weissman is a successful pediatrician who treats both low-income children in Harlem and the pampered scions of the Upper East Side. She is single, and her life recently has been hard. Her father is dying of Alzheimer’s, as Wasserstein’s was when she began the novel. Although Frankie cares for many children, she has convinced herself that she is incapable of maternal love: “Her gift was for analytic detachment.” She shies away from romantic intimacy because she fears her own, deep neediness.

This thread of lonely detachment ran throughout Wasserstein’s plays. She had a primary subject – the lives and choices of a certain generation of educated American women – and a unique way of engaging it. She leavened the sadness or anger of her characters, which was often her own sadness or anger, with a dazzling wit – what one friend called “intellectual pixie dust.” That combination of emotional bareness and wish to charm made her loved by audiences, but not always by critics.

“Uncommon Women and Others,” Wasserstein’s 1977 play about a group of friends from Mount Holyoke, dramatized something that had never been seen onstage before – young women, post-liberation, wondering what to do with their suddenly wide-open futures.

“I sat there and realized with a thud that I had never before seen a play with characters who could have been friends of mine,” the chief theater critic at Newsday and host of the CUNY TV Women in Theatre series, Linda Winer, said. “The stuff of our lives had never before been considered theatrical material.”

Even though the original New York production was received enthusiastically, it wasn’t extended or transferred to Broadway. “The Schubert Organization came to see it,” the dramaturg on that production, Anne Cattaneo, said. They “said they were so sorry, but there was no audience for a play like this, because it was about women’s issues. That was the attitude then: that you couldn’t write plays about this.”

In 1998, Wasserstein’s “The Heidi Chronicles,” an episodic journey through the life of art historian Heidi Holland, proved that wrong. The critic Robert Brustein described it as “‘The Big Chill’ of feminism.” Heidi watches her friends abandon their ideals for the lure of material success. She famously says, in her conclusion to a talk on “Women, Where Are We Going”: “It’s just that I feel stranded. And I thought the whole point was that we wouldn’t feel stranded.” The play won both the Pulitzer Prize and the Tony Award – the first Tony for a woman playwright as sole author.

“Wendy was able to write about women in a way that was very mainstream and didn’t turn off men,” the artistic director of Second Stage Theatre and Wasserstein’s friend, Carole Rothman, said. “It was the combination of the humor and the characters, who were quite lovable and understandable, and not exactly threatening.”

As Wasserstein herself frequently acknowledged, this was also an aspect of her own personality – wanting to be liked, nonthreatening. The critic Michiko Kakutani described her as “an old-fashioned romantic, given to covering over her shyness with wit and girlish banter.” Wasserstein saw her “niceness” as both a liability and a virtue. “I try to be accommodating and entertaining, and some say that’s what’s wrong with my plays,” she said in a 1997 Paris Review interview. “But I think there are very good things about being a woman that have not been taught to men – not bullshit manners but true graciousness.” In the same interview, she said: “What I hate about myself and would like to change is that I get hurt very easily.”

It was that vulnerability that made her work so poignant. “Wendy’s work is very autobiographical,” a close friend and director of several of her plays, Daniel Sullivan, said. “In all of her plays, there is a sort of ‘representage’ of her – in some cases it’s the leading character, in some cases it’s the secondary character. And in that it’s her story being told, there was a certain sensitivity.”

“Wendy wrote, often, from an emotionally naked place in her plays,” another close friend, the playwright Christopher Durang, said by e-mail. “It’s one of the things that touched audiences, and made some of her fans especially devoted to her. I remember, when I saw the various drafts of ‘Uncommon Women,’ how struck I was with how much the character of Holly was clearly Wendy – the physical description (curly hair, a little uncomfortable) was like Wendy, and the character was funny but deflective, as Wendy was.” Late in the play, Holly has a funny but deeply poignant monologue, in which she calls up a handsome doctor she met briefly and tries to make small talk with him, even though he clearly doesn’t have any idea who she is. “I don’t know that Wendy literally did something like that, but I know she felt lots of insecurities as a young woman about how to make romantic connections, and this speech showed it very honestly and movingly.”

Some critics, particularly Mr. Brustein, felt that she focused too much on being funny. “I believed her themes were aerated a bit too much by her bubbling charm, intoxicating sweetness, and sparkling wit,” he wrote, in a memorial published by Lincoln Center, about his response to her early plays. Wasserstein herself said Ms. Cattaneo was always asking her, “When will you show us your dark side?”

But Wasserstein had too much distance on her own anger or melancholy to be wholly dark, and that was also an artistic choice. “It would have been false of her to simply present the dark side,” Mr. Sullivan said. “There was too strong a self-deprecatory style. That had to be a presence in [the plays]; it’s what made her her.” “[T]he plays are deliberately comedic,” Wasserstein said in the Paris Review interview. “Humor masks a lot of anger, and it’s a means of breaking up others’ pretenses and of not being pretentious yourself.”

Still, she did begin to write darker plays. Her 1997 work “An American Daughter” was about a candidate for surgeon general whose nomination is derailed by the disclosure that she once skipped jury duty. It was based on “Nannygate” and on Hillary Clinton’s image problems. Like Mrs. Clinton, the protagonist of “American Daughter” gets in trouble for making comments belittling wives who like to bake, and does penance in a headband.

But “An American Daughter” got mixed reviews and had only a brief run. Ms. Winer loved it, but male critics – Ben Brantley of the New York Times and Michael Feingold of the Village Voice – thought the play tried to do too much and, in consequence, lacked reality. Ms. Cattaneo sees the negative response as a result of the play’s dead-on aim at the difficulties of women in power. “It was so on the money at the time that people just couldn’t see it,” she said.

In 2005, Wasserstein’s last play, “Third,” about a professor whose prejudices against a cocky student lead her to accuse him of plagiarism, also garnered mixed responses, though Mr. Brustein considered it a step forward, calling it, admiringly, “the first play I know to examine [how] the culture wars are managing to polarize contemporary American life.”

Time will judge where Wasserstein’s new novel falls in her oeuvre. With its themes of terrorism and illness, it reflects a consciousness of mortality, while Frankie’s recognition that New York’s elite will maintain the ease of their lives “at any cost” may hint at the author’s anger at life’s unfairness. (Wasserstein was battling lymphoma while she was writing the book. Like many people with fatal illnesses, she struggled to understand why the disease chose her. Wasserstein’s 6 year-old daughter, Lucy Jane, now lives with her uncle.)

One thing the novel doesn’t do is tell us where Wasserstein would have gone next dramatically, or make up for our loss of her sensibility and perspective. The women interviewed for this article – Ms. Rothman, Ms. Cattaneo, and Ms. Winer – all expressed uncertainty about when the next commercially successful female playwright would come along. “Wendy paved the way,” Ms. Cattaneo said, “and I just hope that the forest doesn’t grow around her. I hope it’s not; there was Lillian Hellman, and then there was nothing, and then there was Wendy, and then there was nothing.”

And while Wasserstein has received nothing but critical encomiums since her death, Ms. Winer wishes the recognition had come sooner. “It hurts that she wasn’t appreciated enough in her prime, really, and then now everyone is saying how wonderful the plays are.” To her, the question is: “Don’t you want your eulogies while you’re alive?”