The Good Listener

Toby Roberts #1

by Pamela Hansford Johnson

Toby is a very plausible young good at winning confidences - and also at staving off troublesome emotions. On the point of leaving Cambridge, he meets Maisie, who is beautiful, tense and vulnerable.

She falls in love. He does not. He takes what he can, as young men do. But Maisie tries to force the issue, and he makes off - warned by a friend's disastrous shotgun marriage. There will always be other girls, more cheerful and just as willing . . .

And Toby never worries about minor problems like the way separation wounds its victim. The bitter surprises still in store disconcert him only briefly.

After all, a good listener will always get by.

'With her characteristic mixture of sense and sensibility, Pamela Hansford Johnson creates a whole gallery of convincing characters, entangled in a web of drifting relationships.' Sunday Telegraph

'Beautifully rendered . . . memorable settings and lively characters' Financial Times

'The light shining steadily through each page of Pamela Hansford Johnson's new novel is the light of quality' The Times

'A stunning performance' Nina Bawden, Daily Telegraph

264 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1975

About the author

Pamela Hansford Johnson was born in 1912 and gained recognition with her first novel, This Bed Thy Centre, published in 1935. She wrote 27 novels. Her themes centred on the moral responsibility of the individual in their personal and social relations. The fictional genres she used ranged from romantic comedy (Night and Silence, Who Is Here?) and high comedy (The Unspeakable Skipton) to tragedy (The Holiday Friend) and the psychological study of cruelty (An Error of Judgement). Her last novel, A Bonfire, was published in the year of her death, 1981.

She was a critic as well as a novelist and wrote books on Thomas Wolfe and Ivy Compton-Burnett; Six Proust Reconstructions (1958) confirmed her reputation as a leading Proustian scholar. She also wrote a play, Corinth House (1954), a work of social criticism arising out of the Moors Trial, On Iniquity (1967), and a book of essays, Important to Me (1974). She received honorary degrees from six universities and was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She was awarded the C.B.E. in 1975.

Pamela Hansford Johnson, who had two children by her first marriage with journalist Gordon Neil Stewart, later married C. P. Snow. Their son Philip was born in 1952.