Pamela Hansford Johnson

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Standard Name: Johnson, Pamela Hansford
Birth Name: Pamela Hansford Johnson
Pseudonym: Nap Lombard
Married Name: Pamela Hansford Snow
Titled: Baroness Snow
PHJ had a long and prolific writing career, from before the second world war until late twentieth century. She is remembered primarily as a novelist (with twenty-seven titles),
Hadley, Tessa. “He wants me no more”. London Review of Books, Vol.
38
, No. 2, 21 Jan. 2016, pp. 29-30.
30
though she also wrote poetry, drama, memoirs, and political and social commentary.
Black and white photograph of Pamela Hansford Johnson, seated, with her hands clasped, wearing a white polo-neck sweater with a brooch on the collar. Her dark, wavy hair is smooth and short.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Susan Hill
SH gives free rein to her enjoyment of list-making. Writers mentioned (not in a list or lists) include E. Nesbit (read by Noel Coward on his deathbed), Pamela Hansford Johnson and her husband C. P. Snow
Textual Production Mary Stewart
MS was bored by modern movements like the anti-novel, the sicks and the beats, but felt there was a place for them: they're trying things out, keeping literature alive and moving.
Stewart, Mary. “Mary Stewart”. Counterpoint, edited by Roy Newquist, George Allen & Unwin , 1965, pp. 561-7.
561
She thought her...
Textual Production Barbara Pym
In many ways this novel reflects BP 's undergraduate years at Oxford , featuring characters and episodes based partly on herself, her sister, and her friends or acquaintances. Among these, Henry Harvey and the future...
Textual Production Ivy Compton-Burnett
The manuscript had been due in August 1964. At that time she told Gollancz then that it was not ready, but in a lamentable state.
Spurling, Hilary. Secrets of a Woman’s Heart. Hodder and Stoughton, 1984.
289
She worked on it to the end: a week...
Textual Production Amabel Williams-Ellis
Contributors included Nancy Cunard , Winifred Holtby , Storm Jameson , Pamela Hansford Johnson , Naomi Mitchison , Sylvia Townsend Warner , W. H. Auden , John Lehmann , and John Strachey .
Textual Production Dorothy Whipple
DW 's first story written at and about Barton Seagrave, the place to which she and her husband retired, was about a pretty girl she had watched from her window coping lightly with marriage...
Textual Production Elizabeth Jennings
She also joined with fellow-writers in letters to the Times on matters of public concern. She joined with forty well-known names (including Pamela Hansford Johnson ) on 25 September 1969 to defend keeping up the...
Textual Production Dylan Thomas
The publication was part of the prize offered by the Sunday Referee for the author of the best poem it had published that year. The previous year's winner had been Pamela Hansford Johnson , currently...
Textual Production Olivia Manning
New Stories also published Pamela Hansford Johnson , Dylan Thomas , and Stephen Spender . OM 's title, which is challenging in a way that was characteristic for this stage of her career, comes from...
Reception Ivy Compton-Burnett
During the early part of ICB 's career she was little regarded or understood. Raymond Mortimer was one of the first to perceive her quality, and she quickly began to attract the attention of younger...
Publishing Barbara Pym
She wrote the first draft, she said later, over breakfast in bed in her flat in 1973-4, a period of serious health problems—first breast cancer and then a stroke—and of her decision to retire from...
Publishing Anthony Trollope
Angela Thirkell (an avowed disciple of Trollope) wrote an introduction for an edition of this novel in 1958; so did Pamela Hansford Johnson for the Norton edition four years later. A number of women writers...
Occupation John Donne
During the later seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries Donne's writings were largely forgotten or disapproved of. In June 1741 the London Magazine printed a regularised (to modern eyes butchered) version of Goe, and catche a...
Literary responses Olivia Manning
Amid a chorus of praise for this novel, Pamela Hansford Johnson 's statement that it was among the ten best novels written by women in the past twenty-five years attracted ridicule for its mathematical approach...
Literary responses Elizabeth Taylor
Reviews of A Game of Hide and Seek included high praise from Marghanita Laski and Elizabeth Bowen (some consolation to ET for her problems with her US publisher), but also carping which she found deeply...

Timeline

1 April 1939: General Franco, Nationalist victor in the...

National or international item

1 April 1939

General Franco , Nationalist victor in the Spanish Civil War, declared the conflict over. Republican soldiers had been fleeing over the border to France for some time, and Madrid had fallen on 28 March.
Oxford Reference. http://www.oxfordreference.com.
Johnson, Pamela Hansford. Important to Me. Macmillan; Scribner, 1974.
127-8

22 June 1941: Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union (named...

National or international item

22 June 1941

Hitler 's invasion of the Soviet Union (named Operation Barbarossa, and in contravention of the German-Soviet non-aggression pact of 23 August 1939) began with a surprise attack at dawn which destroyed a thousand Soviet planes...

September 1949: PEN International held a conference in Venice....

Writing climate item

September 1949

PEN International held a conference in Venice. Delegates included W. H. Auden , C. P. Snow , Pamela Hansford Johnson , and Cecily Mackworth .
Mackworth, Cecily. Ends of the World. Carcanet, 1987.
124-6

27 April 1966: Ian Brady and Myra Hindley went on trial...

Building item

27 April 1966

Ian Brady and Myra Hindley went on trial at Chester for the sexual assault and murder of five girls and boys aged between ten and seventeen; they were sentenced to life imprisonment.
“Moors Murderer Hindley Dies”. BBC News, 16 Nov. 2002.

Texts

Johnson, Pamela Hansford. A Bonfire. Macmillan; Scribner, 1981.
Johnson, Pamela Hansford. A Summer to Decide. Michael Joseph, 1948.
Johnson, Pamela Hansford. An Avenue of Stone. Michael Joseph, 1947.
Johnson, Pamela Hansford. An Error of Judgement. Macmillan; Harcourt, Brace and World, 1962.
Johnson, Pamela Hansford. An Impossible Marriage. Macmillan, 1954.
Johnson, Pamela Hansford. Catherine Carter. Macmillan; Knopf, 1952.
Johnson, Pamela Hansford. Corinth House. Evans Bros., 1950.
Johnson, Pamela Hansford. Cork Street, Next to the Hatter’s. Macmillan; Scribners, 1965.
Johnson, Pamela Hansford. I. Compton-Burnett. Longmans, Green, for the British Council and the National Book League, 1951.
Johnson, Pamela Hansford. Important to Me. Macmillan; Scribner, 1974.
Jennings, Elizabeth et al. “Letters to the Editor: Future of Radio”. Times, p. 11.
Johnson, Pamela Hansford. Night and Silence, Who is Here?. Macmillan; Scribner, 1963.
Johnson, Pamela Hansford. On Iniquity. Macmillan; Scribner, 1967.
Johnson, Pamela Hansford. Six Proust Reconstructions. Macmillan, 1958.
Johnson, Pamela Hansford, and Victor Neuburg. Symphony for Full Orchestra. Sunday Referee, 1934.
Johnson, Pamela Hansford. The Family Pattern. Collins, 1942.
Johnson, Pamela Hansford. The Good Husband. Macmillan; Scribner, 1978.
Johnson, Pamela Hansford. The Good Listener. Macmillan; Scribner, 1975.
Johnson, Pamela Hansford. The Holiday Friend. Macmillan; Scribner, 1972.
Johnson, Pamela Hansford. The Honours Board. Macmillan; Scribner, 1970.
Johnson, Pamela Hansford. The Humbler Creation. Macmillan; Harcourt, Brace, 1959.
Johnson, Pamela Hansford. The Last Resort. Macmillan; Harcourt, Brace, 1956.
Johnson, Pamela Hansford, and Marcel Proust. “The Novel of Marcel Proust”. Marcel Proust: Letters to his Mother, translated by. George Duncan Painter and George Duncan Painter, Rider, 1956, pp. 11-31.
Johnson, Pamela Hansford. The Survival of the Fittest. Macmillan; Scribner, 1968.
Johnson, Pamela Hansford. The Trojan Brothers. Michael Joseph, 1944.