Pamela Hansford Johnson

This literary biography traces the life of Pamela Hansford Johnson from her birth in a theatrical family to her death as the widow of C.P. Snow. A prolific writer, she published almost thirty novels, reviewed fiction for major newspapers, and made regular appearances on BBC cultural programmes. She lived through tumultuous changes in British life—1930s political unrest, World War 2, and postwar austerity: social changes that form the background for her fiction. Persuaded by her first love, Dylan Thomas, to abandon writing poetry for writing fiction about her life in South London, she devoted herself to restoring the traditions of social and psychological realism in the English novel at a time when the modernist experimentation of Woolf and Joyce prevailed. Hers was a courageous writing life.