“And so goodbye to ’34, with literary progress beyond all my dreams”

The above quotation ended the 22-year-old Pamela Hansford Johnson’s diary for 1934. Despite notable achievements at grammar school, she had been forced to leave formal education at 16 due to her widowed mother’s financial hardships, and had had to work as a secretary while augmenting her income with token remuneration from poems and short stories commissioned by small magazines. There has been no published collection of her short stories, although it is arguable that some of these can stand comparison with those of Katherine Mansfield or Elizabeth Bowen. In February 1934, however, a book of her poems, entitled Symphony …

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Citation: Pollard, Wendy. "Pamela Hansford Johnson". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 24 February 2015; last revised 10 September 2019. [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=2385, accessed 29 March 2024.]

2385 Pamela Hansford Johnson 1 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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