Pamela Hansford Johnson, Baroness Snow, (29 May 1912 – 18 June 1981) was an English novelist, playwright, poet, literary and social critic.

Life

Johnson was born in London.

In 1936 she married an Australian journalist, Gordon Neil Stewart. Their son Andrew was born in 1941, and a daughter Lindsay, Baroness Avebury (born 1944). Johnson and her first husband Neil were divorced in 1949. In 1950, she married her second husband, the novelist C. P. Snow (later Baron Snow). Their son Philip was born in 1952.

She was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and received a CBE in 1975. She was awarded the honorary degrees of Hon. DLitt (Temple University, Philadelphia 1963; York University, Toronto; Widener University, Chester, Pennsylvania) and Hon. DHL (Louisville, Kentucky). 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. She suffered from migraine for much of her career and wrote about the condition in her autobiographical memoirs Important to me and her novel The Humbler Creation. She was the first president of the Migraine Association and a founding trustee of the Migraine Trust.

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

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 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. In her introduction to a 2002 reprint of the novel, Ruth Rendell wrote that Johnson was "undeservedly forgotten today just as, in her lifetime, she was undeservedly overshadowed by her husband C. P. Snow... Revival for his work is unlikely while her's is overdue. She possessed the imagination and the ability he lacked to write lyrical but never "purple" prose, and there is no finer example in her canon than The Unspeakable Skipton."

Johnson's biographer Deirdre David concluded that "Working in the moral tradition of George Eliot, with the commitment to social justice found in Charles Dickens, and with an unwavering belief that an important task of the English novel was the depiction of everyday life to be discovered from Jane Austen to Anthony Trollope, she was sometimes dismissed as a 'middlebrow' novelist who happily catered to her undemanding readers."

  • Cork Street, Next to the Hatters (1965)
  • The Survival of the Fittest (1968)
  • The Honours Board (1970)
  • The Holiday Friend (1972)
  • The Good Listener (1975)
  • The Good Husband (1978)
  • A Bonfire (1981)
  • Tidy Death (with Neil Stewart) as Nap Lombard (1940)
  • The Grinning Pig (with Neil Stewart) as Nap Lombard (1943)

Critical works

  • Thomas Wolfe: A Critical Study (1947)
  • Ivy Compton-Burnett (Writers and their Work Series) (1951)
  • Marcel Proust's Letters to his Mother, ed. George D. Painter (includes essay)
  • The Novels of Marcel Proust (1956)

Drama

  • Corinth House (1950)
  • Family Party (with C. P. Snow) (1951)
  • Her Best Foot Forward (with C. P. Snow) (1951)
  • The Pigeon with the Silver Foot (with C. P. Snow) (1951)
  • Spare the Rod (with C. P. Snow) (1951)
  • The Supper Dance (with C. P. Snow) (1951)
  • To Murder Mrs Mortimer (with C. P. Snow) (1951)
  • Six Proust Reconstructions (1957)

Sociology

  • On Iniquity: some personal reflections arising out of the Moors Murders trial (1967), Macmillan,

Poetry

  • Symphony for Full Orchestra (1934)

Translation

  • The Rehearsal, by Jean Anouilh, with Kitty Black (1961)

Memoir

  • Important To Me (1974)

References

Further reading

  • Pamela Hansford Johnson Collection at the Harry Ransom Center
  • Desert Island Disks at BBC