Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Pamela Hansford Johnson
-
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, pp. 29-30.
30
though she also wrote poetry, drama, memoirs, and political and social commentary.
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
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...
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.
289
She worked on it to the end: a week...
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 , pp. 561-7.
561
She thought her...
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
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
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...
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
Joanna Cannan
These books were praised by a whole roster of other women novelists: Elizabeth Bowen
, Phyllis Bentley
, and Pamela Hansford Johnson
. Bowen observed of the first that there was much more to this...
Literary responses
Agatha Christie
AC
, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, received the Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Award (1954), the degree of DLitt from the University of Exeter
(1961), and a letter addressed simply...
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.
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....
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.
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.