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 is extremely difficult to label—too good to belong to the middle range but not good enough to belong among the really great. Yet, if, as Iris Murdoch firmly maintains, "it is the function of the writer to write the best book he knows how to write," there can be little doubt that Pamela Hansford Johnson has more than fulfilled her function as a writer. Throughout her long career as a novelist she has demonstrated the seriousness of her commitment to her art and explored those aspects of life that touch upon the experience of most readers with a great deal of lucidity and humaneness. (p. 175)
Gradually her interests seem to have developed from the general toward the particular, and in the novels that she wrote during the 1940s she analyzes man's romantic nature and his tendency to fall in love with an unobtainable dream. In the novels of the 1950s she becomes more preoccupied with the workings-out of an enduring relationship and turns her attention to the circumstances that cause it to disintegrate. Truly successful relationships are rare in her fiction and suggested rather by a promise of their being so than by their actual attainment. Catherine Carter and The Honours Board are the only two novels in which she describes a successful union between her major characters. In general her real gift lies in her ability to analyze pain and loss. The Humbler Creation is an example of how well she is able to convey such emotion and relate it to moral necessity. The novels of the 1960s seem to be characterized by a preoccupation with the problems of good and evil.
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