Pamela Hansford Johnson, Baroness Snow, CBE, FRSL was an English novelist, playwright, poet, literary and social critic.
Life
Hansford Johnson was born in London. Her mother, Amy Clotilda Howson, was a singer and actress, from a theatrical family. Her mother's father, C E Howson, worked for the London Lyceum Company, as Sir Henry Irving's Treasurer. Her father, Reginald Kenneth Johnson, was a colonial civil servant who spent much of his life working in Nigeria. Her father died when she was 11 years old, leaving debts. Her mother earned a living as a typist. Until Pamela was 22, the family lived at 53 Battersea Rise, Clapham, South London. Johnson attended Clapham County Girls Grammar School, where she excelled at English, art history, and drama. After leaving school at the age of 16, she took a secretarial course and later worked for several years at the Central Hanover Bank and Trust Company. She began her literary career by writing poems, which were published by Victor B. Neuburg in the Sunday Referee. In 1933, Johnson wrote to Dylan Thomas, who had also been published in the same paper, and a friendship developed. Marriage was considered, but the idea was ultimately abandoned. In 1936 she married an Australian journalist, Gordon Neil Stewart. Their son Andrew was born in 1941, and a daughter Lindsay, Baroness Avebury. Johnson and her first husband Neil were divorced in 1949. In 1950, she married her second husband, the novelist C. P. Snow. Their son Philip was born in 1952. She was a FRSL and received a CBE in 1975. She was awarded the honorary degrees of Hon. DLitt and Hon. DHL. She was a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Studies at Wesleyan University, of Timothy Dwight College, Yale University and of Founders College, York University, Toronto and held visiting academic positions at other North American universities including Harvard, Berkeley, Haverford and Cornell. C. P. Snow died in July 1980. Less than a year later, Pamela Hansford Johnson died in London. Her ashes were scattered on the river Avon, at Stratford upon Avon.
Works
Hansford Johnson wrote 27 novels. Her first novel, This Bed Thy Centre, was published in 1935. Her last novel, A Bonfire, was published in the year of her death, 1981. Her themes centred on the moral responsibility of the individual in their personal and social relations. Her first novel, This Bed Thy Centre, caused some controversy on its release. Irish novelist Sean Ó Faoláin, writing in The Spectator, said "Miss Johnson... has circumscribed herself so much by insisting on the reality of sex that her 'bed' might be thought less a centre than a circumference". However, the book was positively reviewed by Ralph Straus in The Sunday Times, Compton Mackenzie in the Daily Mail, and Cyril Connolly in The New Statesman. Wendy Pollard, writing in her 2014 biography of Hansford Johnson, suggests that Dylan Thomas, who suggested the title of This Bed Thy Centre, was influenced by the opening chapter when he came to write Under Milk Wood, as both works describe the different characters of their setting as the day begins. The fictional genres she used ranged from romantic comedy and high comedy to tragedy and the psychological study of cruelty. She also wrote two detective novels, jointly with her first husband Neil Stewart, under the joint pseudonym Nap Lombard. She wrote seven short plays, six of them in collaboration with C. P. Snow. She published a number of critical works, short stories, verse, sociological studies, and a collection of autobiographical essays. She reviewed extensively for magazines and newspapers and broadcast on the BBCradio programmeThe Critics. In the 2010s, some of Johnson's novels were republished by Hodder & Stoughton and Persephone Press. Reviewing five novels published by Hodder, Philip Hensher noted that "Johnson was an effective reporter from a particular streak of suburban London, and explored, almost without knowing, the mores and conventions of a forgotten way of living."
