The Orange Chair

After a lengthy correspondence beginning in September 1933 when twenty-one-year-old Pamela Hansford Johnson wrote to nineteen-year-old Dylan Thomas to congratulate him on winning a poetry prize, they finally met in the summer of 1934. When Thomas moved to London and gained fame as a promising young poet and his romantic involvement with Johnson ended, she followed his advice and turned from writing verse to writing fiction. His critiques of her poems were serious and stringent and they convinced her that she could never become a poet. Her first novel, This Bed Thy Centre, was greeted with shocked dismay since it dealt frankly with teenage sexuality and was set in a dingy South London neighbourhood.