The Camberwell Beauty and Other Stories is a collection of nine works of short fiction by V. S. Pritchett first published in 1974 by Chatto & Windus and by Random House.

[4] The date, where available, and journal of original publication are indicated:[5] Penelope Mortimer in the New York Times identifies Pritchett's "minor literary genre" represented in the volume and its perennial cast of characters and themes: "[S]eedy antique dealers and Sunday sailors, adulterous academics, a confused editor of a leftwing periodical, an unlikely film director, lonely people with dogs; old age and remembered childhood.

"[6] Times literary critic Anatole Eroyard contends that Pritchett has "given up exploring motives and illustrating characters as being too simple, unworthy of the name of art" and, as such, the characters remain largely an unsolved "mystery."

"[8] Novelist and short story writer Eudora Welty in the New York Times offered this assessment of the collection: Each story's truth is distilled by Pritchett through a pure concentration of human character...The paradoxes, the stratagems, the escapes, the entanglements, the humors and dreams, are all projections of the individual human being, all by himself alone.

In its essence, Pritchett's work, so close to fantasy, is deeply true to life.