Hansford Johnson, Pamela 1912-81
English novelist, playwright and critic

Born in London, into a theatrical family, she left school at 18, working in a bank and as a book reviewer. For a short time in the early 1930s she was engaged to be married to Dylan Thomas. Her background provided what Margaret Drabble has called 'a peculiar vantage point for an unprejudiced insight into a wide range of behaviour'. Her first novel, This Bed Thy Centre (1935), was set in working-class south London, and her many subsequent novels, such as the tragi-comical The Unspeakable Skipton (1958), are observant of both the world of her youth, and of society in the sixties and seventies, and range from the comic to the morally insightful. Her critical works include writings on Thomas Wolfe and Marcel Proust. In 1950 she married the novelist C P Snow and they collaborated on many literary projects.

Bibliography: I Lindblad, Pamela Hansford Johnson (1982)