Wendy Pollard

Tue 21 October 2014

Heffers Bookshop

In addition to their aesthetic worth, Pamela Hansford Johnson's novels are remarkable for the portraits they paint of almost forgotten, yet comparatively recent, worlds. Her 1930s novels are not set in the privileged surroundings featured in the novels of the majority of her contemporaries, but in the down-to-earth milieu of lower middle-class Londoners. Her novels of the 1940s and 1950s graphically portray the period of social adjustment during, and immediately after, the Second World War. Later, several of her novels focused on moral dilemmas, and she also varied her range with a group of well-received satirical novels.

Her private life was full of incident, the earliest being her youthful romance with Dylan Thomas. Her first marriage was to an Australian journalist, and she subsequently married the novelist and scientist, C.P. (later Lord) Snow. The Snows formed a celebrated literary partnership, travelling widely, and being fêted in academic circles in the USA and the USSR as well as in the UK. The biography also recounts the many intrigues in literary circles in the post-war years when the Snows later became targets for the emerging satire movement. After a number of administrative jobs, Wendy Pollard worked for five years as editorial assistant on the Newsdesk of Independent Television News. While her family was growing up, she studied with the Open University, gaining a first-class honours degree. She was awarded a PhD in 2000 by the English Faculty of the University of Cambridge, for a dissertation on the literary reception of the works of Rosamond Lehmann, which was later published as Rosamond Lehmann and Her Critics: The Vagaries of Literary Reception (Ashgate, 2004).

Cost: £6 + Booking fee and VAT