Error of Judgement, An.
A Portrait Of Evil,
From The Feminine Point Of View
Johnson, Pamela Hansford. An Error of Judgment. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., [1962].
8vo.; grey cloth, spine stamped in red; dark grey, black, white and pink dust-jacket; the dust-jacket nearly flawless, some pages lightly sunned, not affecting text.
First American edition of this novel whose subject matter—evil—was unusual for its time. A presentation copy, intimately inscribed on the title page in the year of publication: To Anna – with much love, Pam/PHJ 19-9-62. We have been unable to further identify the recipient.
Besides being the wife of author C.P. Snow, Hansford was an accomplished novelist and critic in her own right. By the time of the publication of An Error in Judgement, Hansford had more than ten published pieces of fiction under her belt. (She also was a prolific critic, publishing studies of Ivy Compton-Burnett, Marcel Proust, and Agatha Christie to name a few of her varied subjects.)
Johnson (1912-1981) was raised in a lower-middle class British family. Her mother was an actress, and her father was a Colonial officer in the region now known as Ghana. Johnson’s father died before she was ten, at which point her mother, sister and aunt were forced to take in lodgers. For economic reasons Johnson left the Clapham County Secondary School at age sixteen to work as a secretary.
Johnson began writing as a teenager, and her first published book was issued in 1935. At the time her first novel was published she was (briefly) romantically involved with Dylan Thomas; she went on to marry, and divorce, Neil Stewart, a French-educated Australian, and in 1950 met and married the eminent author C.P. Snow.
Johnson’s writing was marked by a frankness about sexuality and about people’s true (and often dark) natures, by a harsh critique of the British class system, and by a bluntness and dexterity uncharacteristic of many women authors of her time. In An Error of Judgment Johnson “disturbingly anatomizes an act of gratuitous evil” (The Feminist Companion to Literature in English, by Virginia Blain, et. al., New Haven: Yale University Press, [1990], p. 583).
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