Among modern novelists, Pamela Hansford Johnson is likely to be remembered best for her stylistic lucidity and psychological acumen. In an age of experimental novelistic techniques often intended to d...
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Critical Essay by Desmond Shawe-taylor
Miss Johnson is distinguishable from the many intelligent novelists of the day by the fact that she is not in the least afraid of people who are ordinary and goo...
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Critical Essay by The Times Literary Supplement
The elderly beauty who cannot quench her desire for love is a stock figure of fiction, though no doubt the theme still contains unexplored possibilities...
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Critical Essay by John Raymond
Catherine Carter once again raises the question of the historical and the "period" novel. Where does the one end and the other begin? One thinks of a �...
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Critical Essay by James Kelly
What could be a more satisfying antidote for today's literary malaise than a lovingly executed Victorian novel of the London theatrical world in the Eighteen Eight...
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Critical Essay by The Times Literary Supplement
Miss Pamela Hansford Johnson is a very cool and intelligent writer, and if she always promises a little more than she performs, her performance is still...
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Critical Essay by Elizabeth Janeway
How long have unmarried British females in their thirties suffered from stifling family relationships and anemic love affairs? Is it only since World War I slaughte...
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Critical Essay by Walter Allen
The Unspeakable Skipton represents a new and perhaps unexpected development in Pamela Hansford Johnson's talents. Together with The Last Resort, which appeared in...
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Critical Essay by Thomas F. Curley
[In The Unspeakable Skipton Miss Hansford Johnson proceeds to a] celebration of Daniel Skipton's doom. That is what the novel is about. From the very beginnin...
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Critical Essay by Whitney Balliett
Two recent English novels—Pamela Hansford Johnson's "The Unspeakable Skipton" and Penelope Mortimer's "Cave of Ice,"...
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Critical Essay by Gerald Sykes
Quite possibly a portent of stiffening literary morality, this excellent novel ["The Humbler Creation"] reverses two of the major trends of good modern fic...
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Critical Essay by Susan M. Black
[In The Humbler Creation] Miss Johnson's style and her material are in tune—almost too much in tune. Only her descriptive, figurative and symbolic use of...
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Critical Essay by Edith H. Walton
Partly due to her precocity—her first book was published when she was only 22—but more to the fact that her talent is genuinely individual, Pamela Hansf...
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Critical Essay by The Times Literary Supplement
One need not be a Christian to believe in Hell—to be aware, that is, of an irredeemable blackness of soul from which there is no escape, for whic...
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Critical Essay by Edmund Fuller
Pamela Hansford Johnson's distinguished body of work is characterized by the range and diversity of her subjects and treatment. Alike in a high, and developing, ...
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Critical Essay by Gerald Sykes
Early in 1960 Pamela Hansford Johnson … published a remarkably effective novel called "The Humbler Creation." It was written in the Victorian tradit...
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Critical Essay by Kenneth Graham
There is nothing of the fantastic in Pamela Hansford Johnson. The Survival of the Fittest is wholesome and sustaining and dramatically un-American. It describes the li...
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Critical Essay by A. S. Byatt
Reading [The Survival of the Fittest] is a curious experience; vague and casual from moment to moment, it is nevertheless compulsive and cumulatively gripping. Its mood i...
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Critical Essay by John Knowles
Miss Johnson's is the humanistic, not the satirical, eye…. [In "The Honours Board"] she gives us telling portraits of the people in and aroun...
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Critical Essay by Dorothy L. Parker
[In "The Honours Board"] as in so many middling-good English novels …, a tidy group of characters has been summoned for some contrived, artific...
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Critical Essay by Julian Symons
[Pamela Hansford Johnson's Important to Me] is basically an autobiography, done with an apparent casualness that conceals a brilliantly skilful shaping and placi...
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Critical Essay by Gillian Wilce
Already widely praised, A Bonfire does possess those qualities noted by others—a modest style conveying an honest perception of the way things were in the Twenti...
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Critical Essay by Marigold Johnson
A Bonfire is an odd novel and its mix of memory, morality and mundane fancy is finally less than satisfying. It is like a plot retold by a child who sees quite clear...
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Critical Essay by Jane Spence Southron
"The Monument" is a novel reflecting a world on the brink of unimaginable disaster. If you had not before read a word by this young English novelis...
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Critical Essay by James Lasdun
Pamela Hansford Johnson is an expert at lulling her reader into a cosy sense of security, and then rudely shocking him out of it. Sections of A Bonfire are pure domestic...
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Critical Essay by Ishrat Lindblad
Any critic faced with the task of defining the nature of Pamela Hansford Johnson's novels finds that, like many of her characters, it belongs to a class that i...
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Critical Essay by John Kenneth Merton
Miss Johnson is a young English writer who already has produced five novels and who with her "World's End," published early this year, achiev...
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Critical Essay by Jane Spence Southron
["Too Dear for My Possessing"] is a book of queer enchantment; of strange, astringent realism; a book stripped utterly of sentimentality but deep w...
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Critical Essay by Desmond Hawkins
Pamela Hansford Johnson belongs, with R. C. Hutchinson and Romilly Cavan, to a new generation of respectably popular novelists who are just arriving, or have just arr...
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Critical Essay by R. Ellis Roberts
Sidney Nichols was the hindquarters of the famous horse which, with his partner Benny Castelli in front, paraded the musichalls of England in the years after the las...
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Critical Essay by Jane Martin
For the purposes of "The Trojan Brothers," her latest novel, Miss Johnson has given up the wholesale manufacture of character types in favor of a well-const...
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Critical Essay by D. S. Savage
An Avenue of Stone is a skilful piece of contemporary reporting about our post-war lives, or the lives of a few selected personages whom Miss Johnson happens to have had...
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Pamela Hansford Johnson
