Pamela Hansford Johnson was born in 1912. As a novelist, she gained recognition with her first novel, This Bed Thy Centre, published in 1935. She then went on to write 26 more novels throughout her life, ranging in genre from romantic and high comedy to tragedy, and the psychological study of cruelty, with themes centred around the moral responsibility of the individual in their personal and social relations. She was also a well-respected critic, a leading Proustian scholar, an essayist, a playwright, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a CBE. She died in 1981.
As her work reappears, another missing jigsaw piece is replaced - Independent Witty, satirical and deftly malicious Sharply observed, artfully constructed and always enlivened by the freshness of an imagery that derives from [Johnson's] poetic beginnings - TLS A story so vivid it might be the memoir of a real person - Britannia and Eve A remarkable craftswoman Miss Johnson is one of the most accomplished of the English women writers - Kirkus Hansford Johnson at her wittiest is Waugh mingled with Malcolm Bradbury A writer whose memory fully deserves to be kept alive