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 fulfille...

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 good. Most writers would run a mile to avoid such people as material for fiction, partly for fashionable reasons (someone might murmur "Priestley," and then where would they be?), but principally because the virtuous are so very difficult to do well. But characters of simple goodness, when realised in fiction without either insipidity or ...

The Unspeakable Skipton represents a new and perhaps unexpected development in Pamela Hansford Johnson's talents. Together with The Last Resort, which appeared in 1956 and is surely one of the best novels of our time, it shows that there can no longer be excuse for failing to recognise that Miss Hansford Johnson is as good as any novelist writing in this country today. She began her career as a novelist when very young, and from the beginning she has been admirably professional; she has always known ...

"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 novelist you would only have to get well away into the opening paragraph to realize that here is a writer of fiction who should matter. There is a sudden downward sweep into the heart of a widely comprehensive subject. There is plain, pregnant wording. There is realism. There is poetic thought. There is a warmth of feeling that embraces mankind not only in...

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 slaughtered thousands of potential husbands? Or does it go further back, to Victorian papas a là Mr. Barrett, and fiancés dead of fever on the North West Frontier? Celia Baird, the heroine of Pamela Hansford Johnson's new novel [The Sea and the Wedding], is one of the most convincing, as she is one of the most pathetically repellent,...

Quite possibly a portent of stiffening literary morality, this excellent novel ["The Humbler Creation"] reverses two of the major trends of good modern fiction. It shows almost none of the frank subjectivity, the recognition of imaginative limitations that so frequently make the modern novelist more interesting than his characters. It also breaks sharply with the bohemian attitudes of those writers who seem to secede from their society in a way that Pamela Hansford Johnson … most clearl...

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 clearly a detailed pattern but hasn't been warned against starting sentences with "And then". But it has the same sort of direct appeal, plunging matter-of-fact into emotion and event with brisk and plangent language. Emma is full of innocent yearnings when her father dies the night of the Guy Fawkes party, which is also the nigh...

[Pamela Hansford Johnson's Important to Me] is basically an autobiography, done with an apparent casualness that conceals a brilliantly skilful shaping and placing of material. Behind headings like 'Education', 'The Liberal Package-Deal', 'Instructions on the History of Art', 'Edith Sitwell', there is a self-portrait and the account of a life. Without dramatic revelations, but with no great reticences either, she tells us about childhood, parent...

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 which there is no consolation. The central character of An Error of Judgement is an agnostic, to all appearances a wise and unusually good man, but he is obsessed by the idea that deep inside he is vile, cruel, and forever damned. Corruptio optimi pessima might have provided Miss Hansford Johnson with one suitable motto for her new novel, though the tortuous and...

Miss Johnson's is the humanistic, not the satirical, eye…. [In "The Honours Board"] she gives us telling portraits of the people in and around [a] small, not very distinguished, upper-middle-class school (all of the characters begin by saying that class distinctions don't matter in Britain any more, and end by suspecting that they do). Central are Cyril and Grace Annick, the aging headmaster and his wife, devoted equally to the school and to each other, and the much longed...

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-constructed plot. The result is the most tightly knit and satisfying narrative she has yet produced. In a London music hall her English Pagliaccio moves toward tragedy in the hindquarters of a horse….

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 last war. The act was called The Trojan Brothers, and the farcical, impudent animal was brought on to the stage by Benny's wife, known in the profession as Miss Maggie. Sid came of a family long connected with the stage: Miss Johnson, in this brilliant and moving story ["The Trojan Brothers"], is extraordinarily successful in h...

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 Eighties? A distant, gas-lit, perfect period it was, more antique and fustian for most of us than the Elizabethan. On deck to shape its historical personality were Ouida, Wilde, Henry James, George Moore, Gilbert & Sullivan…. The Impressionists were stirring and a fresh wind was blowing through the arts, but the decade must have seeme...

Early in 1960 Pamela Hansford Johnson … published a remarkably effective novel called "The Humbler Creation." It was written in the Victorian tradition of Trollope, and it read somewhat like an imaginative social worker's report on the joyless career of a London clergyman whose acceptance of his frustrations made him seem to symbolize a middle-class British preference for public duty over private fulfillment. Now, two and a half years later she has published ["An Error of ...

["Too Dear for My Possessing"] is a book of queer enchantment; of strange, astringent realism; a book stripped utterly of sentimentality but deep with feeling that is both psychic and sensuous. You are not rushed into anything. You drift along as quietly, at first, as did 13-year-old Claud Pickering in his little old boat on the stream that opened out of the Bruges Canal. A boy's world; but an exceptional boy. A boy with an unordinary endowment of sensibility, of artistic perception. Th...

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 lives of a group of friends, all of them in or close to 'the literary world', during the 1930s, the war years, and, briefly, up to the Sixties…. [They] become entangled with one another in various love-affairs and animosities, marry unexpectedly, or divorce, or fail to marry; come to tragic ends, or flourish in middle-aged p...

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 Hansford Johnson has attracted considerable attention in England. She has never, I believe, had an equal success here [in America], nor up till now has she deserved it. Although full of vitality and color, "This Bed Thy Centre" was a confused and ill-organized story, while "Blessed Above Women," its successor, had a morbi...

[In "The Honours Board"] as in so many middling-good English novels …, a tidy group of characters has been summoned for some contrived, artificial reason made recognizable immediately by a series of deftly executed but superficial gestures—and assigned roles to play, virtues to represent, some outlandish deviancy to display or endure ("kleptomania!" "suicide!" "alcoholism!") without their really having much to do with each other—a ...

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 arrived. In [Too Dear for My Possessing] she writes in the first person, as a boy and later as a man; a difficult feat of male impersonation which is strikingly successful and which must inevitably be labelled tour de force…. This is a full-fathoms-five novel to drown in, ample in dimension, leisurely and detailed in development, packed wit...

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 idyll, and one could imagine finding them in women's magazine stories of the period between 1924 and 1937, in which this novel is set. Emma, the heroine, grows up doing and feeling all the things one expects from a girl in that safe, middle-class world: she loves Rochester in Jane Eyre and hates brussell sprouts, she goes to parties ...

Two recent English novels—Pamela Hansford Johnson's "The Unspeakable Skipton" and Penelope Mortimer's "Cave of Ice,"… are forceful suggestions that perhaps the irrepressible magnetism of the novel lies, when all is said and done, in its elusiveness, its basic indefinability. Miss Johnson's book, which has been described in the English press as a remarkable work that enlarges the boundaries of the novel, appears to have changed shape in crossing ...

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 well out of the range of most novelists. She writes very carefully, building up a character with small, ingenious strokes; her observation of social and intellectual nuances is acute; yet in the end much of her work is softened by an emotionalism which blurs the outlines of character and weakens the story. The Last Resort [published in the United States as ...

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, quality of workmanship and human feeling, they are immensely varied otherwise. She does not repeat; she is always trying the unexpected. "The Unspeakable Skipton," "The Humbler Creation," and this novel ["An Error of Judgement"] suffice to demonstrate the point. Here she examines the complex nature an...

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 "period" novel as an artificial, impressionistic potboiler and the majority are little better than that. Indeed, Miss Hansford Johnson's book bears signs of the atmospheric writing that we associate with the film script. Yet, long before we have finished this 460-page evocation of the Victorian theatre we realise that this bo...

[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 light and color call attention to the prose. The author writes of skies that are transparent, violet, cobalt, brilliant with stars and lime-green. She described blazes, bubbles, gleams and lozenges of light that may be pale, deforming, dull, reflected, lemon, sallow, torporous or sour and that comes from fire, lamp, sun and moon. Characters r...

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. Unfortunately Miss Hansford-Johnson, who does not seem to feel any compelling interest in her subject, has treated it in a mechanical way [in her novel An Avenue of Stone]…. One is not quite sure whether Miss Hansford-Johnson fully realizes that the woman who cannot grow old is a pathetic rather than a tragic figure. The attitude of the devoted thou...

[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 beginning, from the time Skipton hears and sees, through his pocket mirror, Dorothy Merlin say of him, "Why is that man like a carrion crow," you know Skipton is lost. Not that you care. Insufferable in victory, magnificently spiteful and enraged in defeat, Skipton on his death bed conquers, but only esthetically, his gross tormentors. It&...

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 is elegiac: characters, places, periods, history, are evoked, suggested, rather than solidly dramatic. There are moments of drama—Polly's terror, the richly amoral Georgina's blank and intense misery over a one-page divorce, her convincing and detailed discovery after remarrying her husband of a sexual satisfaction that ...

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, it would seem, under her observation. Her central character is a reluctantly ageing, but still captivating, beauty whose last bid for youth and life takes the form of a pathetic attachment to a spineless young man who apologetically sponges on her until he finds the girl to make him the kind of capable and dominating wife he requires. It i...

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 Twenties and Thirties. This much-remarked-upon feel for period is perhaps not as impressive as the psychological accuracy. After all, it has been possible much more recently for a young woman to feel the same half-real fear of the eternal bonfire at the end of the primrose path of sexual self-indulgence that lurks in Emma's consciousness dur...

Miss Johnson is a young English writer who already has produced five novels and who with her "World's End," published early this year, achieved a certain amount of success. The facility with which she writes, combining with the praise she has received (in England there is a disposition to rank her rather highly) seems to have gone to her head. For in her latest ["The Monument"] she has attempted something beyond her powers, and in her youthful overconfidence has even attem...