A summer to decide

Helena #3

by Pamela Hansford Johnson

Book by Johnson, Pamela Hansford

Genres: Fiction

382 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1954

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.

Reviews

[Lou · Rating 4 out of 5]

Неспешная и тихая проза о обычных людях в послевоенном Лондоне. Вторая книга Памелы Хенсфорд Джонсон, почему-то совершенно неизвестной у нас писательницы, хотя и переведённой на русский, не менее хороша, чем "Кристина" ("Impossible marriage"). В последнее время говорят об Энн Тайлер или Барбаре Пим, так вот Памела Хэнсфорд Джонсон как минимум не хуже.

[Lesley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well-written if occasionally a bit sententious - I would put that on the narrator if I didn't recollect a similar trend in other of her novels either not in first person or a different first person. But her central character/narrator - he's too inactive to be a protagonist, in fact somewhere in the narrative someone calls him 'a stick' and the reader, at least this reader, tends to concur - is really terribly uninteresting. This would possibly matter less if the novel focused on the problems with his half-sister's marriage, the revelation that her husband has been involved in dodgy dealings with stolen cars and the fallout from that, etc etc. But we are presumably also supposed to care about his career and relationship dilemmas. Meh.