Pamela Hansford Johnson

© Illustrated London News Ltd/Mary Evans

Pamela Hansford Johnson shocked the public at age twenty-three when she published This Bed Thy Centre (1935), a sexually frank novel inspired by her romance with Dylan Thomas. Its success allowed Johnson to quit secretarial work and launch a fulltime literary career. She would publish twenty-six more novels. Although Johnson’s career was overshadowed in her lifetime by that of her second husband, the novelist C.P. Snow, The Unspeakable Skipton (1959) retains a more passionate following than any of her other books, or his.