Elaine Ford, who wrote spare, elegant novels about quiet lives and thwarted aspirations, died on Sunday at her home in Topsham, Me. She was 78.

The cause was a brain tumor, her husband, Arthur Boatin, said.

Ms. Ford’s five published novels and her many short stories found their power in details and in ordinary, believable characters, often working women in Massachusetts or Maine who were confronting the consequences of choices made and paths not taken.

“Captured in spare, ringingly authentic dialogue and leavened with ironic humor, Ford’s close-up on quietly desperate lives, like Walker Evans’s famous photos, is beautiful and disturbing,” Publishers Weekly said of her 1989 novel, “Monkey Bay.”

Elaine Ford was born on Dec. 12, 1938, in White Plains. She grew up in northern New Jersey, where her father, John, was a bank loan officer and her mother, Ruth, was active in education causes.