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 full-time literary career. She would publish twenty-six more novels, and though 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.