[Pamela Hansford Johnson's Important to Me] is basically an autobiography, done with an apparent casualness that conceals a brilliantly skilful shaping and placing of material. Behind headings like 'Education', 'The Liberal Package-Deal', 'Instructions on the History of Art', 'Edith Sitwell', there is a self-portrait and the account of a life. Without dramatic revelations, but with no great reticences either, she tells us about childhood, parents, two marriages, children, times of depression and times of anguish like those of her husband's (C. P. Snow's) two eye operations, during the second of which he suffered cardiac arrest. Within the limits of being well-mannered, she is straightforward and admirably candid. She understands, but does not stress, the limiting influences on her own life, the necessities imposed by her own character. Was it remarkable that her mother should live in the same house with husband and wife during both marriages? To me...