The Windham-Campbell judges describe her as "one of English's finest contemporary writers" and state that her writing "brilliantly illuminates ordinary lives with extraordinary prose that is superbly controlled, psychologically acute, and subtly powerful.

[5][10] She researches and teaches on James and Jane Austen, as well as early 20th century novelists and short-story writers, especially women, including Elizabeth Bowen, Katherine Mansfield and Jean Rhys.

"[22] Hadley has stated that she incorporated some material from her mother's life in her second novel, Everything Will Be All Right (2003),[23] which documents women's roles over the previous fifty years in its description of four generations of one family.

[10][24] The author Joanna Briscoe, in a review for The Guardian, describes the novel as a "virtually plotless portrait of a series of breathtakingly ordinary mortals, which tackles few large themes and lacks the satisfaction of any real narrative arc" and yet is "mysteriously, bewitchingly compelling.

"[24] The author Stevie Davies, in a review for The Independent, states that "Hadley reminds us of the remorselessness of time and the replaceability of selves;" she calls the novel "intriguing, complex and irritating" and praises its metaphorical use of historical detail.

[25] The Master Bedroom (2007) focuses on a single character, a female academic in her mid-forties who leaves London to look after her elderly mother in Wales and finds herself sexually pursued by a teenager and his father.

"[29] The author Jean Thompson, writing for The New York Times, considers that the emphasis on the characters' thoughts might "muffle plot momentum" and challenges Hadley to "take a further step into the imaginative and transformational, into life that is not merely true but riveting and magical.

"[30] Clever Girl (2013), a first-person account of the life of a woman of fifty, "revives a very old genre, the female picaresque," exemplified by Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders, but Claire Lowdon, in a review for the New Statesman, criticises it for lacking that novel's humour.

[31] The literary critic Elaine Showalter describes the novel's structure as a series of short stories – three chapters were published in The New Yorker in that form – and considers "the whole is less than the sum of the parts.

[34] The academic Christopher Stuart describes the book as having "a rare combination of clarity and complexity" and praises it for putting James's work into the context of both the Anglo-American and continental traditions; he also highlights the "very sensitive, and frequently brilliant, textual analysis" and the "sharp, accessible, witty prose.

"[34] The academic Phyllis Van Slyck calls the book "a sensitive and beautifully crafted reading" of the meaning of pleasure in James's fiction, describing the writing as "often eloquent," but considers that Hadley should have explained more clearly how her work relates to earlier research on the topic.