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The Ha-Ha
This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book.
192 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1961
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13023 people want to read
About the author
Jennifer Dawson
10 books62 followersJennifer Dawson was born and brought up in Kennington and Camberwell, South London with her three sisters and one brother. She was educated at Mary Datchelor School in Camberwell.
Jennifer read History at St Anne's College, Oxford. During her time at Oxford University she suffered a breakdown and spent several months in the Warneford Hospital, Oxford.
After graduating in 1954, Jennifer worked variously as a teacher in a convent in Laval, France, as a subeditor and indexer for the Clarendon Press and Oxford University Press on two encyclopaedias and the supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary, as a welfare worker in London's East End and as a social worker in a psychiatric hospital in Worcester. In 1959 she was awarded the Dawes Hicks Scholarship for Philosophy to study at University College, London.
Jennifer marched in the ground-breaking Aldermaston marches organised by the emerging Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in the late 1950s and early 1960s. She met her husband Michael Hinton, an Oxford philosophy don, on the 1963 Aldermaston march.
Jennifer's experience as a mental health professional and as a patient formed the basis for her critically acclaimed 1961 debut novel "The Ha-Ha" which explores a young woman's experience of schizophrenia and the mental health care system.
Jennifer and her husband lived for many years in Charlbury near Oxford.
An Obituary for Jennifer Dawson by Polly Patullo and Elizabeth Mitchell was published in The Guardian on 26 October 2000.
Jennifer read History at St Anne's College, Oxford. During her time at Oxford University she suffered a breakdown and spent several months in the Warneford Hospital, Oxford.
After graduating in 1954, Jennifer worked variously as a teacher in a convent in Laval, France, as a subeditor and indexer for the Clarendon Press and Oxford University Press on two encyclopaedias and the supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary, as a welfare worker in London's East End and as a social worker in a psychiatric hospital in Worcester. In 1959 she was awarded the Dawes Hicks Scholarship for Philosophy to study at University College, London.
Jennifer marched in the ground-breaking Aldermaston marches organised by the emerging Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in the late 1950s and early 1960s. She met her husband Michael Hinton, an Oxford philosophy don, on the 1963 Aldermaston march.
Jennifer's experience as a mental health professional and as a patient formed the basis for her critically acclaimed 1961 debut novel "The Ha-Ha" which explores a young woman's experience of schizophrenia and the mental health care system.
Jennifer and her husband lived for many years in Charlbury near Oxford.
An Obituary for Jennifer Dawson by Polly Patullo and Elizabeth Mitchell was published in The Guardian on 26 October 2000.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 154 reviews
October 28, 2025
i love books about women going insane. i must be destined to like a 60-year-old rediscovered one
(thanks to the publisher for the arc)
(thanks to the publisher for the arc)
January 12, 2021
“One feeling that has haunted me all my life is that life, social life as we know it, is a kind of game with correct moves, correct remarks and replies, correct procedures. I don't know the rules.”
- Jennifer Dawson
In Jillian Becker’s account of the final days of her friend Sylvia Plath’s life, she recalls Plath asking for a copy of Jennifer Dawson’s The Ha-Ha. Dawson’s book predated Plath’s The Bell Jar but they’ve sometimes been bracketed together, along with Janet Frame’s Faces in the Water and Hannah Green’s I Never Promised You a Rose Garden as part of an informal series, from the early 60s, dealing with young women and madness; further linked by their authors’ personal experiences of being hospitalised after some form of mental health crisis.
Dawson’s novel won a major literary prize when it first appeared, was recommended reading for mental-health workers and later resurrected by Virago as part of its original Modern Classics’ range but still remains relatively obscure although, after reading it, I find it hard to see why that might be. It’s a striking variation on a coming-of-age story, a sensitive, frequently understated portrait of a young woman dealing with mental illness, which in turn raises important questions about the very nature of so-called mental health, particularly for women.
The novel’s centred on Josephine, socially-awkward, her closest bond has always been with her mother. After a difficult time at school and a childhood dominated by her mother’s forceful ideas about how best to live, Josephine gets a coveted place to study at Oxford University. But when she arrives the pressure of negotiating its myriad, unspoken rules and social expectations, coupled with her mother’s sudden death, lead to a break between Josephine’s reality and that of the wider world. This divide manifests in the form of hallucinatory visions in which scenes of rigidly-scripted Oxford interactions are disrupted by images of lush jungles filled with exotic beasts. It’s not long before Josephine’s committed to a psychiatric institution, one of the Victorian, fortress-style asylums that were still commonplace in 60s’ England. Time passes and Josephine’s selected for “regrading” and possible release but re-entry into the so-called “real world” poses its own set of problems. It’s an intimidating space composed of boxes that don’t fit, where Josephine’s options are presented in terms of a muted conformity to a patriarchal culture and an uninviting future defined by a suitable marriage and children.
I found Dawson’s depiction of Josephine and, through her, the day-to-day existence of psychiatric patients persuasive and perceptive; one that didn’t shy away from complexity or offer up easy answers in its exploration of the intricate relations and boundaries between self and society, sanity and madness. Dawson's writing often impressed me, effortlessly encompassing conventionally realist and more experimental, elliptical prose as her style echoed Josephine’s shifting mental states. There were other less successful, slightly stilted sections, and elements of Josephine's involvement with fellow patient Alasdair made me wince, but I thought these failings were outweighed by Dawson’s razor-sharp representations of Josephine’s tentative social interactions as well as the bleaker aspects of standard medical interventions of the time. There were passages here too that surprised me with their unexpected lyricism and curious beauty.
- Jennifer Dawson
In Jillian Becker’s account of the final days of her friend Sylvia Plath’s life, she recalls Plath asking for a copy of Jennifer Dawson’s The Ha-Ha. Dawson’s book predated Plath’s The Bell Jar but they’ve sometimes been bracketed together, along with Janet Frame’s Faces in the Water and Hannah Green’s I Never Promised You a Rose Garden as part of an informal series, from the early 60s, dealing with young women and madness; further linked by their authors’ personal experiences of being hospitalised after some form of mental health crisis.
Dawson’s novel won a major literary prize when it first appeared, was recommended reading for mental-health workers and later resurrected by Virago as part of its original Modern Classics’ range but still remains relatively obscure although, after reading it, I find it hard to see why that might be. It’s a striking variation on a coming-of-age story, a sensitive, frequently understated portrait of a young woman dealing with mental illness, which in turn raises important questions about the very nature of so-called mental health, particularly for women.
The novel’s centred on Josephine, socially-awkward, her closest bond has always been with her mother. After a difficult time at school and a childhood dominated by her mother’s forceful ideas about how best to live, Josephine gets a coveted place to study at Oxford University. But when she arrives the pressure of negotiating its myriad, unspoken rules and social expectations, coupled with her mother’s sudden death, lead to a break between Josephine’s reality and that of the wider world. This divide manifests in the form of hallucinatory visions in which scenes of rigidly-scripted Oxford interactions are disrupted by images of lush jungles filled with exotic beasts. It’s not long before Josephine’s committed to a psychiatric institution, one of the Victorian, fortress-style asylums that were still commonplace in 60s’ England. Time passes and Josephine’s selected for “regrading” and possible release but re-entry into the so-called “real world” poses its own set of problems. It’s an intimidating space composed of boxes that don’t fit, where Josephine’s options are presented in terms of a muted conformity to a patriarchal culture and an uninviting future defined by a suitable marriage and children.
I found Dawson’s depiction of Josephine and, through her, the day-to-day existence of psychiatric patients persuasive and perceptive; one that didn’t shy away from complexity or offer up easy answers in its exploration of the intricate relations and boundaries between self and society, sanity and madness. Dawson's writing often impressed me, effortlessly encompassing conventionally realist and more experimental, elliptical prose as her style echoed Josephine’s shifting mental states. There were other less successful, slightly stilted sections, and elements of Josephine's involvement with fellow patient Alasdair made me wince, but I thought these failings were outweighed by Dawson’s razor-sharp representations of Josephine’s tentative social interactions as well as the bleaker aspects of standard medical interventions of the time. There were passages here too that surprised me with their unexpected lyricism and curious beauty.
January 7, 2019
4.5 stars
I must admit that Jennifer Dawson wasn’t a novelist who was really on my radar; but thanks to virago here we are! She should have been on my radar as she writes about mental health and this, her first novel (which won the James Tait Black memorial prize in 1961) is mainly set in an institution designed to contain those whom society deemed to have a mental illness which necessitated removal from what we laughingly called normalcy.
Dawson came from a Fabian family and stayed within a politically radical tradition; she was an early member of CND. Among a number of teaching roles and working for publishers Dawson was also a social worker in a psychiatric hospital in Worcester. I am always a little wary of those who write about mental health having known only the coercive, controlling and managing side of the spectrum. However Dawson, whilst she was at Oxford University was admitted to one of those hospitals (Warneford in Oxford) she later worked in following what was described as a breakdown. This does show I think and clearly the protagonist Josephine is partially autobiographical. She too is studying at Oxford and her interior world begins to intrude too much into her daily life. As Dawson herself said; "The story was really about a girl who did not have the knack of existing, and the images in it reflected my own preoccupations."
Dawson wrote a perceptive afterword to the virago edition, giving a historical context, which is relevant. Dawson wrote the novel just after the 1959 Mental Health Act. As she points out it was just before the libertarian mental health movements of the 60s; before Laing, Szasz and Kesey had really started their critiques. Most importantly before writers like Sedgewick (in Psychopolitics) had begun to question the way society classifies mental health and linking it to the ills of capitalism. The novel also falls just before the feminist movement of the 60s. Dawson is eloquent bout the role of women at the time and Josephine is exposed to “women as objects” attitudes from a number of directions.
The title is interesting. The website devoted to Dawson gives the classic definition:
“A ha-ha is a turfed ditch used to keep grazing livestock out of a garden or estate whilst providing an uninterrupted view from within. The name "ha-ha" was given to the feature because, when walking towards it from the garden, the ditch only becomes apparent when the observer comes very close to it.”
In the book the ha-ha is the place in the grounds where Josephine met with Alasdair, a patient in the male side of the hospital and it comes to have symbolism for them both. However the idea of an invisible divide, only obvious as you get near it is also symbolic of the contrived divide between the residents of the hospital and the outside world (including the staff).
The writing itself is understated and quite descriptive of Josephine’s state of mind from her own point of view. Descriptions are often matter of fact, as with the use of ECT at one point. Initially the reader can be fooled into thinking there might be a love story in the offing, but it develops into a protest about mental health practices and as one critic noted there develops an “atmosphere of quiet terror”. Dawson also emphasizes the importance of small gestures and little acts (positive and negative). At times Josephine does interact with the boundaries of the clinic, even though at times these seem quite loose and even the often mild Josephine can react;
“The committee? Regrade? I knew they graded eggs and milk, I did not know that they also had this word for humans. Regrade me?…As what?”
In her afterword Dawson says this of her first novel;
“If I could write The Ha-Ha again, I suppose I'd make it clearer at the end that the heroine's experience was sharpened and that she didn't just drift into the irrevocable madness of disrelation; that her surprise-response was quickened, not slowly closed down; that the silver dew on the spider's web glittered in the mornings, but did not blacken; that she became more open to receive. Greedy even.”
This is an interesting and thought provoking novel, not nearly as well-known as it ought to be, but certainly worth reading and I will certainly look for more of Dawson’s novels.
I must admit that Jennifer Dawson wasn’t a novelist who was really on my radar; but thanks to virago here we are! She should have been on my radar as she writes about mental health and this, her first novel (which won the James Tait Black memorial prize in 1961) is mainly set in an institution designed to contain those whom society deemed to have a mental illness which necessitated removal from what we laughingly called normalcy.
Dawson came from a Fabian family and stayed within a politically radical tradition; she was an early member of CND. Among a number of teaching roles and working for publishers Dawson was also a social worker in a psychiatric hospital in Worcester. I am always a little wary of those who write about mental health having known only the coercive, controlling and managing side of the spectrum. However Dawson, whilst she was at Oxford University was admitted to one of those hospitals (Warneford in Oxford) she later worked in following what was described as a breakdown. This does show I think and clearly the protagonist Josephine is partially autobiographical. She too is studying at Oxford and her interior world begins to intrude too much into her daily life. As Dawson herself said; "The story was really about a girl who did not have the knack of existing, and the images in it reflected my own preoccupations."
Dawson wrote a perceptive afterword to the virago edition, giving a historical context, which is relevant. Dawson wrote the novel just after the 1959 Mental Health Act. As she points out it was just before the libertarian mental health movements of the 60s; before Laing, Szasz and Kesey had really started their critiques. Most importantly before writers like Sedgewick (in Psychopolitics) had begun to question the way society classifies mental health and linking it to the ills of capitalism. The novel also falls just before the feminist movement of the 60s. Dawson is eloquent bout the role of women at the time and Josephine is exposed to “women as objects” attitudes from a number of directions.
The title is interesting. The website devoted to Dawson gives the classic definition:
“A ha-ha is a turfed ditch used to keep grazing livestock out of a garden or estate whilst providing an uninterrupted view from within. The name "ha-ha" was given to the feature because, when walking towards it from the garden, the ditch only becomes apparent when the observer comes very close to it.”
In the book the ha-ha is the place in the grounds where Josephine met with Alasdair, a patient in the male side of the hospital and it comes to have symbolism for them both. However the idea of an invisible divide, only obvious as you get near it is also symbolic of the contrived divide between the residents of the hospital and the outside world (including the staff).
The writing itself is understated and quite descriptive of Josephine’s state of mind from her own point of view. Descriptions are often matter of fact, as with the use of ECT at one point. Initially the reader can be fooled into thinking there might be a love story in the offing, but it develops into a protest about mental health practices and as one critic noted there develops an “atmosphere of quiet terror”. Dawson also emphasizes the importance of small gestures and little acts (positive and negative). At times Josephine does interact with the boundaries of the clinic, even though at times these seem quite loose and even the often mild Josephine can react;
“The committee? Regrade? I knew they graded eggs and milk, I did not know that they also had this word for humans. Regrade me?…As what?”
In her afterword Dawson says this of her first novel;
“If I could write The Ha-Ha again, I suppose I'd make it clearer at the end that the heroine's experience was sharpened and that she didn't just drift into the irrevocable madness of disrelation; that her surprise-response was quickened, not slowly closed down; that the silver dew on the spider's web glittered in the mornings, but did not blacken; that she became more open to receive. Greedy even.”
This is an interesting and thought provoking novel, not nearly as well-known as it ought to be, but certainly worth reading and I will certainly look for more of Dawson’s novels.
December 25, 2025
'I want to live, to feel. I was born for something more than mere sanity. I was born for so much joy. A great possibility of joy. More than you could ever imagine. My life is far different than you could imagine,' I was shouting.
Returned to print by Faber, this is a book to file productively alongside not just Woolf, Kavan, Rhys and Plath, but also the lives of Zelda Fitzgerald, Viv Haigh-Wood/Eliot and Antonia White's Beyond the Glass as well as The Yellow Wall-Paper as part of a canon of female 'madness' narratives. Importantly, these books don't cohere in any kind of simplistic or reductive manner: they don't think about or represent feminine 'madness' and its affects in any single form. Dawson's is perhaps one of the most optimistic narratives - though don't underestimate the anxieties it articulates - as it thinks about how 'madness' is defined and the extent to which it is controlled by societal expectations of gender and cultural accommodations.
Set in a hangover of the old Victorian asylums, systems of 'regrading', lobotomies and electric shock treatment, this also shows the crossover of medical thinking in the late 1950s/early 1960s with a compassionate nurse (who has herself fled from Nazi Germany) and rehabilitation in the form of work in the community. The sensitivity of Josephine, the narrator, is expressed via her brittle prose which works especially well when she recounts her interactions with other people: her memories of a perhaps overbearing mother, the former students at Somerville who invite her to a party, the patient Alistair with whom she has assignations in the ha-ha.
It seems there were limitations on what this book was allowed to say, especially in terms of the sexual material towards the end: it feels elliptical both intentionally and, perhaps, for censorship reasons (it's probably not coincidence that Lady Chatterley's Lover in mentioned in the text).
Dawson's writing is immediate and makes productive use of different tonalities: the voice that navigates the everyday interactions of life; the excessive, almost surreal imagery that emerges at times of stress when syntax starts to break down; the 'political' voice that is asking questions of how madness is defined and what it means in social contexts, especially for ideas of gender and conforming (Alistair's pressure to perform offers up a sideline on masculine anxieties that I'd have liked to have heard more about though I can see that would have pushed the narrative out of shape). I especially liked the resonance of the title: the ha-ha is a liminal space, both of and beyond the institution, where Josephine and Alistair meet; but laughter is also a marker of Josephine slipping out of control, of her voice becoming too loud, too 'hysterical', too non-conforming of social conventions.
In the end, this feels more defiantly positive than some of the other narratives I've read in this genre: Woolf's fear that drove her, at least partly, to suicide; Plath's loss of connection to herself despite the flowering of her poetic creativity; Kavan's psychic break that left her stranded. Dawson's story can be bleak but there's also something stronger, more resistant in her Josephine that leads to a wide-open ending.
December 17, 2025
Josephine is a young woman who laughs at the wrong moment, which in her world is every moment. At a tea party among polite undergraduates she perceives "even toed ungulates, files of armadillos with scaly shells, and hosts of big black flies" instead of young women in floral dresses. That grotesque vision collapses into a fit of laughter that she treats as the only honest response to the absurdity of being alive. One snort later she is hauled to a psychiatric hospital where the decor suggests that joy checked out decades ago and forgot to return its key.
The place has a ha ha, a trench disguised as a lawn feature, which the architects probably designed during a long lunch. It is meant to be a barrier yet it looks like a joke nature got tired of telling. Josephine spends her days drifting along its grassy edge like someone trying to understand the absurdity of her own life.
Inside the hospital she collects characters. There is the kindly Sister with an accent that wanders all over the map. There are patients who clap at walls, patients who stare at ceilings, and staff members who treat the phrase real world as contraband. The hospital committee plans to regrade Josephine, which makes her sound like a crate of eggs awaiting a quality stamp rather than a human being with a pulse.
Then there is Alasdair, a fellow patient who breezes in. He has theories about everything, including why he cannot finish detective novels and why Sunday feels like an ancient curse. He talks a lot, laughs even more, and constantly complains about the hospital. Josephine finds him puzzling, annoying, entertaining, and slightly magnetic.
As Josephine spends more time outside cataloguing books for a retired colonial couple she keeps discovering how faint the border is between what people call normal and what they quietly fear. Her old Oxford friend Helena reappears in a burst of stylish efficiency, insisting that grown up life is a chore, marriage is a bear trap, and a woman must stay interesting even while becoming a cabbage.
Josephine watches all these busy citizens rushing about their little tasks while she tries to figure out where existence actually begins. She senses that the world is a strange improvised stage set full of props that might topple over at any time. The hospital keeps telling her to prepare for reentry into society.
Through it all, the laughter that once sabotaged her life lingers in the background like a mischievous echo waiting for the next cue. The ha ha becomes the symbol of everything she balances on, everything she might climb out of, everything she might dissolve into. And she moves through this story learning the delicate arts of falling, rising, wandering, and choosing which edge she will stand on next.
The Ha Ha is sharp, unsettling, and observant in a way that comes from someone who has lived through the thing she wrote about. The book sits there with its pale face and its bag of nerves and demands that you see the world the way Josephine sees it.
Josephine moves through her days like someone who misplaced the instruction manual for being human. Dawson lets you watch as she tries to bridge the gap between the so called normal world and the so called broken world, a gap that is mostly imaginary yet brutally enforced.
The novel stays close to her perspective while reality wobbles like a loose floorboard. Ordinary details grow strange because Josephine lacks filters. You get the uncut version of existence. It is exhausting and moving and often darkly funny.
Normality is a performance. Sanity is a line drawn by committees with clipboards. Laughter becomes rebellion or symptom depending on who is grading you. The world is absurd and fragile and too complicated for any system to label cleanly. A person who perceives too much is treated as if she perceives too little.
Dawson writes from lived experience, and it shows. In tone she sometimes recalls The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath or fragments of existential works like The Outsider by Albert Camus, yet the effect remains personal. She handles institutionalization without turning it into spectacle or sermon. She lets Josephine be human rather than symbolic. The hospital appears with blunt accuracy, not monstrous but flawed, full of good intentions and terrible habits. That combination is scarier than cartoon cruelty.
Josephine lives in a world where a young woman is supposed to be agreeable, comprehensible, and predictable. Her misalignment, intentional or not, is treated as malfunction. The moment she deviates she becomes a problem.
Her laughter disrupts the performance of femininity. Her mind refuses the script. The hospital becomes a place to put women who are too alive for the narrow paths laid out for them.
Late fifties Britain was wobbling between the old world of hierarchy and the coming explosion of the sixties. The novel rests at that hinge. Pressure builds in the background. Old gender roles crack. The medical system tries to modernize and stumbles.
Josephine is a woman out of sync with her culture, and the culture has no idea what to do with her except put her behind a high wall and hope she stabilizes. The book is a perfect artifact of its moment.
The institutional details feel dated, yet the emotional truth has not dimmed. Alienation remains. The pressure to perform normality remains. Misunderstood women remain. The book still lands where it intends to.
3.5 stars rounded up
The place has a ha ha, a trench disguised as a lawn feature, which the architects probably designed during a long lunch. It is meant to be a barrier yet it looks like a joke nature got tired of telling. Josephine spends her days drifting along its grassy edge like someone trying to understand the absurdity of her own life.
Inside the hospital she collects characters. There is the kindly Sister with an accent that wanders all over the map. There are patients who clap at walls, patients who stare at ceilings, and staff members who treat the phrase real world as contraband. The hospital committee plans to regrade Josephine, which makes her sound like a crate of eggs awaiting a quality stamp rather than a human being with a pulse.
Then there is Alasdair, a fellow patient who breezes in. He has theories about everything, including why he cannot finish detective novels and why Sunday feels like an ancient curse. He talks a lot, laughs even more, and constantly complains about the hospital. Josephine finds him puzzling, annoying, entertaining, and slightly magnetic.
As Josephine spends more time outside cataloguing books for a retired colonial couple she keeps discovering how faint the border is between what people call normal and what they quietly fear. Her old Oxford friend Helena reappears in a burst of stylish efficiency, insisting that grown up life is a chore, marriage is a bear trap, and a woman must stay interesting even while becoming a cabbage.
Josephine watches all these busy citizens rushing about their little tasks while she tries to figure out where existence actually begins. She senses that the world is a strange improvised stage set full of props that might topple over at any time. The hospital keeps telling her to prepare for reentry into society.
Through it all, the laughter that once sabotaged her life lingers in the background like a mischievous echo waiting for the next cue. The ha ha becomes the symbol of everything she balances on, everything she might climb out of, everything she might dissolve into. And she moves through this story learning the delicate arts of falling, rising, wandering, and choosing which edge she will stand on next.
The Ha Ha is sharp, unsettling, and observant in a way that comes from someone who has lived through the thing she wrote about. The book sits there with its pale face and its bag of nerves and demands that you see the world the way Josephine sees it.
Josephine moves through her days like someone who misplaced the instruction manual for being human. Dawson lets you watch as she tries to bridge the gap between the so called normal world and the so called broken world, a gap that is mostly imaginary yet brutally enforced.
The novel stays close to her perspective while reality wobbles like a loose floorboard. Ordinary details grow strange because Josephine lacks filters. You get the uncut version of existence. It is exhausting and moving and often darkly funny.
Normality is a performance. Sanity is a line drawn by committees with clipboards. Laughter becomes rebellion or symptom depending on who is grading you. The world is absurd and fragile and too complicated for any system to label cleanly. A person who perceives too much is treated as if she perceives too little.
Dawson writes from lived experience, and it shows. In tone she sometimes recalls The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath or fragments of existential works like The Outsider by Albert Camus, yet the effect remains personal. She handles institutionalization without turning it into spectacle or sermon. She lets Josephine be human rather than symbolic. The hospital appears with blunt accuracy, not monstrous but flawed, full of good intentions and terrible habits. That combination is scarier than cartoon cruelty.
Josephine lives in a world where a young woman is supposed to be agreeable, comprehensible, and predictable. Her misalignment, intentional or not, is treated as malfunction. The moment she deviates she becomes a problem.
Her laughter disrupts the performance of femininity. Her mind refuses the script. The hospital becomes a place to put women who are too alive for the narrow paths laid out for them.
Late fifties Britain was wobbling between the old world of hierarchy and the coming explosion of the sixties. The novel rests at that hinge. Pressure builds in the background. Old gender roles crack. The medical system tries to modernize and stumbles.
Josephine is a woman out of sync with her culture, and the culture has no idea what to do with her except put her behind a high wall and hope she stabilizes. The book is a perfect artifact of its moment.
The institutional details feel dated, yet the emotional truth has not dimmed. Alienation remains. The pressure to perform normality remains. Misunderstood women remain. The book still lands where it intends to.
3.5 stars rounded up
October 2, 2012
"I will swim back silently," I thought, "as though I had never been absent."
Fish out of water and the land is looking out the hole to see yourself looking into the same airless window. May I have a glass of water, please? Twenty-three year old Oxford student Josephine wears a poker face that holds no hand to its percussionless chest. The volcano erupting inside is dormant laughter. Without mirth, like a helpless tic to index with the latest catch-all social disease. Have pity... Who? I am worried about myself that at first I felt that Josephine didn't have it so bad in her mental institution. Over the wall, on the bench, under the table. Over the smile upside down. Maybe even a little envious. She's safe from the outside world where she had no place. The window looks out onto mystery to replace threat. She has a job cataloguing books for a library. When asked what it is she is sorting she can only reply "Everything". Everything is everything. The work is as meaningless to her as reading in an unknown language. Mystery without threat, if you reside in the routine currents. A deceased mother with cheap magazine paper doll cut-out dreams to vicariously live through her daughter. Best friend, she says. I was reminded of the line in The Breakfast Club when the Ally Sheedy character says that any friends she had wouldn't mind (it was a judgemental situation). I feel the same about the possibilty of imaginary friends. Josephine's averted danger holds cards to the chest about dear mama. Did she secretly hate her? Twist her arm, lead her under the table. Josephine meets a man from across the way where the male patients reside. Some are, you know, schizzies. Labels like unschooled fish when you aren't close up enough to worry. Is that what they say about him, about me? Before in Oxford when young women hung on arms, lucky to be there. Names on the roster as meaningless as photos from old high school yearbooks. Most likely to... Well, did they? Once a man tried to kiss her. You're no fun, you know. The expected space is space and that is Josephine's problem. Tragically, for her. I don't care if they get no fun out of her bowl. Is there something wrong with her or something wrong with the world? Do you wonder if fish think we're the ones in a tank? I wouldn't want to go to the party from old school chum Helena (chum as in copied off of homework, you know THOSE friends). I would have known before then, but then when you're residing on the shore on the other side you don't always remember what it was like. That's how steps forward and three steps back work. Josephine would probably be labeled as a disassociative in today's time. In the days when people (mostly women) were locked away for no reason than no one knew what else to do with them she's up for a board to repackage. I was envious of Josephine because I didn't believe she was out of place at all. What are labels, anyway? Why wouldn't she belong? I know that she would feel the same as one person out of their own skin to another. Friends of mine wouldn't mind. The face cracks and the joker card isn't so funny. The hand holding patient has cold hands like a fish. He swims in the river Severn and across the shore it's I gotta push off and you're a sweet girl but did you really think I was going to stick around. Sweet girl. I didn't care much about Alasdair as a window into her dry land. He wets his lips to speak of it without dampening. He speaks as if he is on a repeat performance night in a play. Flowers, please. It was the German nun in the institution that made me not want to breathe there anymore. She wanted Josephine to stay there, behind that pale face and dreams of something, maybe rabbits. If Josephine felt too much about Alasdair it was better than not feeling anything. The curtain can close. Run and see what's on the other side, please. A friend I would have would. A friend would I have. Why didn't they want better for her than that? I want to know. Why did that happen to those women, and why does it still happen?
"As we sat there I could see the even-toed ungulates marching through the waste, and files of armadillos with scaly shells, and hosts of big black flies. The door opened... it was only the maid in a starched cap carrying the silver kettle, but the laugh I gave shocked even the principal."
Jennifer Dawson wrote an afterword in 1984. The Ha-Ha was written in 1960, after the Mental Health Act.
She says this: If I could write The Ha-Ha again, I suppose I'd make it clearer at the end that the heroine's experience was sharpened and that she didn't just drift into the irrevocable madness of disrelation; that her surprise-response was quickened, not slowly closed down; that the silver dew on the spider's web glittered in the mornings, but did not blacken; that she became more open to receive. Greedy even.
I wonder how her fantasies made the rest of life still waters. My idea is she was not living her own, hence the restlessness in the conversational pauses. Do this next? How did the cross the way view of young David, labeled a schizzie, not threaten with his own fate? Didn't it forebode more on those institutional octagonal tiles webbing her in if she tried to walk just a little bit farther past where she was allowed to go. If she didn't fit it is probably important that she didn't consider the pieces. Dawson seems to me to think it most important that there's something wrong with the world if you have to know the rules. She's still not alone in it. Who will pull her along when she's not pretending to be blind? What's going to fill those silences if weren't listening to look for what you were doing wrong? That's a tough one to get over, the self reflexive mirror smashing. I get that Dawson had a lot to say about the times. I like a lot that she wasn't hoisting their voids over her own head in a boombox. But what's she going to do when she runs? Forever? Would it be so bad to stare into the snaking dream rivers? I probably shouldn't think the right thing to do is hide when facing social calculus (I suck at math. How about fractions?). It's not much better to run. I don't like that idea if there's nothing on the bottom. It's appealing and not hard at all to see how Josephine ended up where she did. Can I just change the world? No?
Fish out of water and the land is looking out the hole to see yourself looking into the same airless window. May I have a glass of water, please? Twenty-three year old Oxford student Josephine wears a poker face that holds no hand to its percussionless chest. The volcano erupting inside is dormant laughter. Without mirth, like a helpless tic to index with the latest catch-all social disease. Have pity... Who? I am worried about myself that at first I felt that Josephine didn't have it so bad in her mental institution. Over the wall, on the bench, under the table. Over the smile upside down. Maybe even a little envious. She's safe from the outside world where she had no place. The window looks out onto mystery to replace threat. She has a job cataloguing books for a library. When asked what it is she is sorting she can only reply "Everything". Everything is everything. The work is as meaningless to her as reading in an unknown language. Mystery without threat, if you reside in the routine currents. A deceased mother with cheap magazine paper doll cut-out dreams to vicariously live through her daughter. Best friend, she says. I was reminded of the line in The Breakfast Club when the Ally Sheedy character says that any friends she had wouldn't mind (it was a judgemental situation). I feel the same about the possibilty of imaginary friends. Josephine's averted danger holds cards to the chest about dear mama. Did she secretly hate her? Twist her arm, lead her under the table. Josephine meets a man from across the way where the male patients reside. Some are, you know, schizzies. Labels like unschooled fish when you aren't close up enough to worry. Is that what they say about him, about me? Before in Oxford when young women hung on arms, lucky to be there. Names on the roster as meaningless as photos from old high school yearbooks. Most likely to... Well, did they? Once a man tried to kiss her. You're no fun, you know. The expected space is space and that is Josephine's problem. Tragically, for her. I don't care if they get no fun out of her bowl. Is there something wrong with her or something wrong with the world? Do you wonder if fish think we're the ones in a tank? I wouldn't want to go to the party from old school chum Helena (chum as in copied off of homework, you know THOSE friends). I would have known before then, but then when you're residing on the shore on the other side you don't always remember what it was like. That's how steps forward and three steps back work. Josephine would probably be labeled as a disassociative in today's time. In the days when people (mostly women) were locked away for no reason than no one knew what else to do with them she's up for a board to repackage. I was envious of Josephine because I didn't believe she was out of place at all. What are labels, anyway? Why wouldn't she belong? I know that she would feel the same as one person out of their own skin to another. Friends of mine wouldn't mind. The face cracks and the joker card isn't so funny. The hand holding patient has cold hands like a fish. He swims in the river Severn and across the shore it's I gotta push off and you're a sweet girl but did you really think I was going to stick around. Sweet girl. I didn't care much about Alasdair as a window into her dry land. He wets his lips to speak of it without dampening. He speaks as if he is on a repeat performance night in a play. Flowers, please. It was the German nun in the institution that made me not want to breathe there anymore. She wanted Josephine to stay there, behind that pale face and dreams of something, maybe rabbits. If Josephine felt too much about Alasdair it was better than not feeling anything. The curtain can close. Run and see what's on the other side, please. A friend I would have would. A friend would I have. Why didn't they want better for her than that? I want to know. Why did that happen to those women, and why does it still happen?
"As we sat there I could see the even-toed ungulates marching through the waste, and files of armadillos with scaly shells, and hosts of big black flies. The door opened... it was only the maid in a starched cap carrying the silver kettle, but the laugh I gave shocked even the principal."
Jennifer Dawson wrote an afterword in 1984. The Ha-Ha was written in 1960, after the Mental Health Act.
She says this: If I could write The Ha-Ha again, I suppose I'd make it clearer at the end that the heroine's experience was sharpened and that she didn't just drift into the irrevocable madness of disrelation; that her surprise-response was quickened, not slowly closed down; that the silver dew on the spider's web glittered in the mornings, but did not blacken; that she became more open to receive. Greedy even.
I wonder how her fantasies made the rest of life still waters. My idea is she was not living her own, hence the restlessness in the conversational pauses. Do this next? How did the cross the way view of young David, labeled a schizzie, not threaten with his own fate? Didn't it forebode more on those institutional octagonal tiles webbing her in if she tried to walk just a little bit farther past where she was allowed to go. If she didn't fit it is probably important that she didn't consider the pieces. Dawson seems to me to think it most important that there's something wrong with the world if you have to know the rules. She's still not alone in it. Who will pull her along when she's not pretending to be blind? What's going to fill those silences if weren't listening to look for what you were doing wrong? That's a tough one to get over, the self reflexive mirror smashing. I get that Dawson had a lot to say about the times. I like a lot that she wasn't hoisting their voids over her own head in a boombox. But what's she going to do when she runs? Forever? Would it be so bad to stare into the snaking dream rivers? I probably shouldn't think the right thing to do is hide when facing social calculus (I suck at math. How about fractions?). It's not much better to run. I don't like that idea if there's nothing on the bottom. It's appealing and not hard at all to see how Josephine ended up where she did. Can I just change the world? No?
December 18, 2025
The novel Sylvia Plath was reading just before her death. I’d be interested to know if she actually finished it or was only part way through.
I found this a beautifully written, at times heartbreaking novel about a young woman’s experience of mental illness.
I wish Jennifer Dawson’s other novels were more readily available as I would love to read more of her.
I found this a beautifully written, at times heartbreaking novel about a young woman’s experience of mental illness.
I wish Jennifer Dawson’s other novels were more readily available as I would love to read more of her.
December 23, 2025
I wish I could write sentences like hers. Glorious. “I was born for something more than mere sanity.”
July 16, 2025
Nota: 5 sobre 5
Premisa:
Josephine está ingresada en un hospital psiquiátrico desde la muerte de su madre. Allí, además de evolucionar favorablemente, conoce a un hombre que le hará replantearse sus motivaciones y su intención de pertenercer al mundo real, no solo al universo patologizado de la salud mental.
Opinión:
Si uno echa la mirada unos años hacia atrás y pone el foco en los tratamientos realizados en torno a la salud mental y el concepto que se tenía de las personas neurodivergentes y con enfermedades psiquiátricas, es inevitable que el vello se erice y los ojos se cierren de forma instintiva. La realidad superó a la ficción. La despersonalización, la inexistencia de escrúpulos en el daño perpetrado a las personas. Todo basado en que el fin justifica los medios.
Lo peor de todo es que, aunque la situación ha mejorado notablemente, las personas con una salud mental inestable sufren un estigma social complicado de paliar. Sucede especialmente cuando los trastornos son raros o llamativos en su forma conductual. La falta de educación, de respeto, de conciencia de la diferencia provocan que la población sienta con suerte indiferencia y si no, un incuestionable rechazo.
Por eso necestiamos voces que reivindiquen, que visibilicen y desmitifiquen los efectos que producen las diferentes formas que tienen de funcionar nuestro cerebro. Y si encima esto se publica y divulga en un momento como fueron los años 60 en el que las instituciones psiquiátricas estaban empezando a cambiar en su concepto y función, más relevancia y valor posee.
El relato es tremendamente intimista y costumbrista. Acompañas en su día a día a una jóven que se siente desconcertada ante sus circunstancias y que posee un anhelo incesante de pertenecer al mundo y vivir de la manera más normalizada posible. Una lucha constante mientras su vida y su ser están limitados por el diagnóstico y la medicalización, convertidas en trampa y verdugo.
Me ha parecido una joya absoluta que se comprende mucho mejor si se conoce su contexto y relevancia. Una lectura que me ha hecho recordar lo que amo mi profesión y la importancia del respeto y la curiosidad hacia el diferente, de comprender nuestra variabilidad y procesarla como un elemento enriquecedor, como una ganancia, un aprendizaje.
Premisa:
Josephine está ingresada en un hospital psiquiátrico desde la muerte de su madre. Allí, además de evolucionar favorablemente, conoce a un hombre que le hará replantearse sus motivaciones y su intención de pertenercer al mundo real, no solo al universo patologizado de la salud mental.
Opinión:
Si uno echa la mirada unos años hacia atrás y pone el foco en los tratamientos realizados en torno a la salud mental y el concepto que se tenía de las personas neurodivergentes y con enfermedades psiquiátricas, es inevitable que el vello se erice y los ojos se cierren de forma instintiva. La realidad superó a la ficción. La despersonalización, la inexistencia de escrúpulos en el daño perpetrado a las personas. Todo basado en que el fin justifica los medios.
Lo peor de todo es que, aunque la situación ha mejorado notablemente, las personas con una salud mental inestable sufren un estigma social complicado de paliar. Sucede especialmente cuando los trastornos son raros o llamativos en su forma conductual. La falta de educación, de respeto, de conciencia de la diferencia provocan que la población sienta con suerte indiferencia y si no, un incuestionable rechazo.
Por eso necestiamos voces que reivindiquen, que visibilicen y desmitifiquen los efectos que producen las diferentes formas que tienen de funcionar nuestro cerebro. Y si encima esto se publica y divulga en un momento como fueron los años 60 en el que las instituciones psiquiátricas estaban empezando a cambiar en su concepto y función, más relevancia y valor posee.
El relato es tremendamente intimista y costumbrista. Acompañas en su día a día a una jóven que se siente desconcertada ante sus circunstancias y que posee un anhelo incesante de pertenecer al mundo y vivir de la manera más normalizada posible. Una lucha constante mientras su vida y su ser están limitados por el diagnóstico y la medicalización, convertidas en trampa y verdugo.
Me ha parecido una joya absoluta que se comprende mucho mejor si se conoce su contexto y relevancia. Una lectura que me ha hecho recordar lo que amo mi profesión y la importancia del respeto y la curiosidad hacia el diferente, de comprender nuestra variabilidad y procesarla como un elemento enriquecedor, como una ganancia, un aprendizaje.
November 15, 2025
I think about the show Mad Men, set in the 1960s, and it leads me to thoughts of "Mad Women" of the 1950s-60s, and how interesting of a show that would be. I've recently been stumbling upon book after book set in this time period, where apparently, women were going mad left and right. Maybe, instead, women were finally pushing boundaries and talking about their illness, seeking help, and taking a stand for their own needs at the cusp of the second wave of the feminist movement.
The book we are exploring today is written about a young woman who has a breakdown at uni, and not coincidentally, the author also endured a breakdown in her last year at uni, subsequently spending 6 months in a psychiatric hospital. She later went on to work in the mental health field and author many novels relating to mental health (I can't wait to track down more of her work.) The Ha-Ha is her first novel, originally published in 1961. This US re-release edition was just released Tuesday by Scribner.
Before I get into the book, I want to explore some rather startling similarities with Sylvia Plath and Jennifer Dawson. My interest was first piqued about Plath's relationship to Dawson when The Bell Jar was referenced in the synopsis for this book on NetGalley.
So I did some research.
Jennifer Dawson: Born 1929
Sylvia Plath: Born 1932
JD: Institutionalized at a psychiatric facility while at St. Anne's College (part of Oxford Univ.); dates are not clear, presumably sometime between 1951 and 1952.
SP: Institutionalized in 1953 after her first suicide attempt while at Smith College.
JD: Graduated from Oxford in 1952
*Sidenote: she also studied with Iris Murdoch while there.*
SP: Graduated from Smith College in 1955
JD: Wrote and published her first novel, The Ha-Ha, in 1961.
SP: Wrote The Bell Jar, her first and only novel, in 1961, but did not publish until 1963, one month before her death by suicide.
A last plot twist: Sylvia was documented to have been reading The Ha-Ha the WEEKEND before she died.
There is a striking parallelism here that is more than a tad bit eerie if you ask me. My references are obviously not limited to just these two remarkably talented ladies. Throw Anne Sexton in here too—born in 1928, first institutionalized in 1954—adding one more woman that I'm familiar with. I'm sure, though, that the list of such coincidences is abundant.
What was happening in the mid-50s that all of these extremely gifted women were losing their marbles at the same time? This is a rabbit hole to go down, but one for another day—additional research will be commenced at a later date, but I couldn't not remark on this. The similarities were just too startling to ignore and do have relevance to this book.
Getting to The Ha-Ha.
Finally, Rita.
Yes, yes, I know. You should know by now I like to go off on tangents. I can't help it. I have a lot to say, and not enough space to do it in. Darn 2200 characters.
So the book. I really enjoyed it. I didn't love it, but I could appreciate what it was doing (definitely a 4-star). One thing I have noticed that is glaring and obvious after reading many books now on the subject of women being institutionalized for mental health—most of the time, the books mostly don't make sense. There is an apparent reason; the author is trying to convey that sense of madness, what it actually felt like. This "feeling" is chased time and again, and each person's experience is unique, making consistency across these experiences absent.
There were some definite strong points. The writing started out a tad confusing to me. It was disorienting and a bit fragmented. I do think this was the point though. You are meant to feel out of place, uncomfortable in your skin, not understanding how to exist in the world. These are the experiences that our MC Josephine is partaking in as she has just been pulled from uni and sent to an institution which is where we find her at the opening of the book.
She is well into her stay, now experiencing some light at the end of the tunnel from what we can gather, and is now due for a "regrading"—what a hideous term—in which her status will presumably be reevaluated and it will be determined whether she is still "insane" and stays in the hospital, or is "sane" and is released back into the free world. As she waits on her fate to be determined, she meets Alasdair, an anxiety riddled young lad who teaches her some things she doesn't know, and her whole world is upended...
JD gives two gifts to the common reader in her writing of this book that correlate. The first, she skillfully maneuvers the reader into understanding how big, and simultaneously how small, the world can be when your mental health is in question. The second, during this timeframe when world-size is another concept in question, it is imperative that you find others you can trust. (Especially when you are on the "inside." I'm making this sound like prison, but truly, it isn't that different.) We are all in charge of our own worlds and determining their size and capacity. In turn, we have to take responsibility for how and why we choose to relate to others. Josephine learns this important lesson while in the throes of emotional dysregulation at various points in the book.
Repeated themes/concepts that were there over and over again: laughter, the loss of control or the ability to be in control, trying to fit into a world we don't belong to, and the meaning of existence.
This isn't just a story about another woman that loses her mind. It's most importantly about being true to yourself, coming to terms with your own "outsider-ness"—creating your own world where you belong—and where you can find your own joy in living.
I verified this quote online, and out of the many things I highlighted, this still stands as the most outspoken and impactful:
"I wanted the knack of existing. I did not know the rules."
11/12/25 - This has a slow start, but at about 40% it started to come together more nicely and then some key observations and insights were introduced. Overall it was a short, enjoyable read, and I can see why it is compared to The Bell Jar. Similar in tone and somewhat in structure, but not quite as whimsical, if you could call it that, as The Bell Jar; a little more akin to Down Below or Cold Nights of Childhood.
There was an afterword by the author, in which she mentions another fiction book (short stories) called Hospital Wedding, and now I really want to read it. After an unhealthy amount of online research, I have not been able to find it for sale anywhere. I have found it at University libraries and the Library of Congress, but sadly do not have access to such places. Oh well.
Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an ebook ARC in exchange for my honest review.
The book we are exploring today is written about a young woman who has a breakdown at uni, and not coincidentally, the author also endured a breakdown in her last year at uni, subsequently spending 6 months in a psychiatric hospital. She later went on to work in the mental health field and author many novels relating to mental health (I can't wait to track down more of her work.) The Ha-Ha is her first novel, originally published in 1961. This US re-release edition was just released Tuesday by Scribner.
Before I get into the book, I want to explore some rather startling similarities with Sylvia Plath and Jennifer Dawson. My interest was first piqued about Plath's relationship to Dawson when The Bell Jar was referenced in the synopsis for this book on NetGalley.
So I did some research.
Jennifer Dawson: Born 1929
Sylvia Plath: Born 1932
JD: Institutionalized at a psychiatric facility while at St. Anne's College (part of Oxford Univ.); dates are not clear, presumably sometime between 1951 and 1952.
SP: Institutionalized in 1953 after her first suicide attempt while at Smith College.
JD: Graduated from Oxford in 1952
*Sidenote: she also studied with Iris Murdoch while there.*
SP: Graduated from Smith College in 1955
JD: Wrote and published her first novel, The Ha-Ha, in 1961.
SP: Wrote The Bell Jar, her first and only novel, in 1961, but did not publish until 1963, one month before her death by suicide.
A last plot twist: Sylvia was documented to have been reading The Ha-Ha the WEEKEND before she died.
There is a striking parallelism here that is more than a tad bit eerie if you ask me. My references are obviously not limited to just these two remarkably talented ladies. Throw Anne Sexton in here too—born in 1928, first institutionalized in 1954—adding one more woman that I'm familiar with. I'm sure, though, that the list of such coincidences is abundant.
What was happening in the mid-50s that all of these extremely gifted women were losing their marbles at the same time? This is a rabbit hole to go down, but one for another day—additional research will be commenced at a later date, but I couldn't not remark on this. The similarities were just too startling to ignore and do have relevance to this book.
Getting to The Ha-Ha.
Finally, Rita.
Yes, yes, I know. You should know by now I like to go off on tangents. I can't help it. I have a lot to say, and not enough space to do it in. Darn 2200 characters.
So the book. I really enjoyed it. I didn't love it, but I could appreciate what it was doing (definitely a 4-star). One thing I have noticed that is glaring and obvious after reading many books now on the subject of women being institutionalized for mental health—most of the time, the books mostly don't make sense. There is an apparent reason; the author is trying to convey that sense of madness, what it actually felt like. This "feeling" is chased time and again, and each person's experience is unique, making consistency across these experiences absent.
There were some definite strong points. The writing started out a tad confusing to me. It was disorienting and a bit fragmented. I do think this was the point though. You are meant to feel out of place, uncomfortable in your skin, not understanding how to exist in the world. These are the experiences that our MC Josephine is partaking in as she has just been pulled from uni and sent to an institution which is where we find her at the opening of the book.
She is well into her stay, now experiencing some light at the end of the tunnel from what we can gather, and is now due for a "regrading"—what a hideous term—in which her status will presumably be reevaluated and it will be determined whether she is still "insane" and stays in the hospital, or is "sane" and is released back into the free world. As she waits on her fate to be determined, she meets Alasdair, an anxiety riddled young lad who teaches her some things she doesn't know, and her whole world is upended...
JD gives two gifts to the common reader in her writing of this book that correlate. The first, she skillfully maneuvers the reader into understanding how big, and simultaneously how small, the world can be when your mental health is in question. The second, during this timeframe when world-size is another concept in question, it is imperative that you find others you can trust. (Especially when you are on the "inside." I'm making this sound like prison, but truly, it isn't that different.) We are all in charge of our own worlds and determining their size and capacity. In turn, we have to take responsibility for how and why we choose to relate to others. Josephine learns this important lesson while in the throes of emotional dysregulation at various points in the book.
Repeated themes/concepts that were there over and over again: laughter, the loss of control or the ability to be in control, trying to fit into a world we don't belong to, and the meaning of existence.
This isn't just a story about another woman that loses her mind. It's most importantly about being true to yourself, coming to terms with your own "outsider-ness"—creating your own world where you belong—and where you can find your own joy in living.
I verified this quote online, and out of the many things I highlighted, this still stands as the most outspoken and impactful:
"I wanted the knack of existing. I did not know the rules."
11/12/25 - This has a slow start, but at about 40% it started to come together more nicely and then some key observations and insights were introduced. Overall it was a short, enjoyable read, and I can see why it is compared to The Bell Jar. Similar in tone and somewhat in structure, but not quite as whimsical, if you could call it that, as The Bell Jar; a little more akin to Down Below or Cold Nights of Childhood.
There was an afterword by the author, in which she mentions another fiction book (short stories) called Hospital Wedding, and now I really want to read it. After an unhealthy amount of online research, I have not been able to find it for sale anywhere. I have found it at University libraries and the Library of Congress, but sadly do not have access to such places. Oh well.
Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an ebook ARC in exchange for my honest review.
August 14, 2021
Very good - go read Paul and Mariel’s reviews to see more on why
August 28, 2025
A weird and whimsical novel with a dark twist in the second act. The tonal shift caught me off guard, and I finished the book feeling confused, if not dissatisfied. It manages to say a lot about psychiatric treatment and women's roles without leaving the murky boundaries of reality or devolving into mere polemics. The cyclical nature of mental illness/health is accurately and poignantly depicted. I think I was wishing for more whimsy, for the narrator to find a way through her difficulties that would bring some of the light and levity that her condition carried. But, as is so often the case, a broken heart was the catalyst for change, and the change was messy and sad. A thought-provoking read, and the afterword by the author is also pretty interesting.
November 27, 2025
Read 90% of it on a single bus ride, so in terms of minutes per dollar I did not get my money’s worth, but it was very very good
July 17, 2025
The Ha-Ha tells us of one young woman's mental crisis. Published in the early sixties, it draws on the authors experiences as a social worker on psychiatric wards.
Josephine, the narrator, is now in an institution, having been sent there after a breakdown suffered whilst at Oxford Uni, shortly after her mothers death. She struggles to connect with society, and had a very close connection to her mother, who would help her with the 'rules', now she doesn't seem to know how to fit in.
It can feel confusing and disorienting being in Josephine's head all the time, which I imagine was deliberate, and makes for an affecting reading experience; but also makes it pretty difficult to write about. Worth a read.
*Many thanks to Netgalley and Faber for a copy in exchange for an honest review.*
Josephine, the narrator, is now in an institution, having been sent there after a breakdown suffered whilst at Oxford Uni, shortly after her mothers death. She struggles to connect with society, and had a very close connection to her mother, who would help her with the 'rules', now she doesn't seem to know how to fit in.
It can feel confusing and disorienting being in Josephine's head all the time, which I imagine was deliberate, and makes for an affecting reading experience; but also makes it pretty difficult to write about. Worth a read.
*Many thanks to Netgalley and Faber for a copy in exchange for an honest review.*
September 6, 2018
This book leaves a lasting impression - it was over 20 years ago that I read it and I can still recall the experience of being drawn into a different head-space as the narrative unfolded and presented the outlook of an individual with schizophrenia.
Its critically acclaimed, first-person account is based on the author's personal experience of the condition. The story takes up at the point where Josephine (the narrator) is recovering in a psychiatric hospital, and she relates her progression, ever-threatened by her vivid but fragmented/sometimes chaotic thought-world which bubbles away, not to mention its often alienating results (v.heart-breaking). The narrative also illustrates the inadequate and sometimes appalling treatments that were recommended in those days (The Ha-ha was published 1961). Not surprisingly a major relapse is in store for Jo, but the read is not at all dreary - the imaginative environment into which she retreats is generally not malignant, and she shows a courageous spirit in trying to hold onto what she feels is her identity as she rejects unwanted suppressive interventions.
While these outlines may seem familiar (Janet Frame and others spring to mind) and somewhat dated (given the improvements in the treatments of mental illness - though I daresay there's scope for more improvement) the individual who emerges from the pages is unforgettably original, spirited and though probably controversial in her resistance, has to win our sympathy and admiration for her struggle to preserve her sense of self and of meaning.
Its critically acclaimed, first-person account is based on the author's personal experience of the condition. The story takes up at the point where Josephine (the narrator) is recovering in a psychiatric hospital, and she relates her progression, ever-threatened by her vivid but fragmented/sometimes chaotic thought-world which bubbles away, not to mention its often alienating results (v.heart-breaking). The narrative also illustrates the inadequate and sometimes appalling treatments that were recommended in those days (The Ha-ha was published 1961). Not surprisingly a major relapse is in store for Jo, but the read is not at all dreary - the imaginative environment into which she retreats is generally not malignant, and she shows a courageous spirit in trying to hold onto what she feels is her identity as she rejects unwanted suppressive interventions.
While these outlines may seem familiar (Janet Frame and others spring to mind) and somewhat dated (given the improvements in the treatments of mental illness - though I daresay there's scope for more improvement) the individual who emerges from the pages is unforgettably original, spirited and though probably controversial in her resistance, has to win our sympathy and admiration for her struggle to preserve her sense of self and of meaning.
September 10, 2025
4 stars. Exploration of a young woman’s struggle with mental illness while attending Oxford University. I found out this was originally published in 1961 and was amazed. We focus on Josephine, who is a little socially awkward due to her overbearing mother. She attends Oxford university following her mother’s death and has a mental health crisis, which leads her to stay in a psychiatric hospital. Ugh, just a short but very good read. As always, thank you Scribner for the wonderful earc.
December 29, 2025
A vivid portrait of a young woman's admission to, and time spent in, a psychiatric hospital, during the late 1950s in England. Josephine is an extremely bright young woman, with an interest in Anglo Saxon literature, and has studied in Oxford. However, she struggles to make connections with anyone, and, following the death of her mother, behaves so strangely that she is admitted to a psychiatric ward. Jennifer Dawson explores Josephine's experiences here, and her moments of freedom spent in the 'ha-ha'. It's a subtle, carefully considered novel, which is well worth reading, but lacks a certain depth.
Read
October 8, 2025elaine kraf meets sylvia plath with a dash of muriel spark. sometimes one needs a mildly hallucinatory first person gal narrator. it’s like going to the brain spa. i emerged feeling soothed
May 15, 2022
“Huzur vaat eden şu manzara ne fena,
Ve ne fena asla huzur bulamayan bu kalp!”
Ve ne fena asla huzur bulamayan bu kalp!”
May 20, 2012
What, is a "Ha-Ha" (a trench that allows an unobstructed view while maintaing a physical barrier in one direction), an "ungulate" (a hooved mammal) and "dendrex renata" (quite possibly a made-up Latin word, but when read in context may refer to ear wax or dandruff)? I picked up this book at a used bookstore, chosen because of its title and the John Brack portrait on the cover. In this case, frivolity served me well, for even though I didn't know Jennifer Dawson, this book won the John Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1961. It was applauded in its day for exposing questionable mental health practices of that era, and for its lucid depiction of mental illness.
Josephine exhibits classic features of schizophrenia, though her diagnosis is shrouded in secrecy. She lives in apprehensive horror she may be labelled with what is believed to be the worst-case scenario. Just as she yearns to be led blindly "without thinking or feeling" by the suavely detached Alasdair ("...I'll blindfold myself then shall I"), she is meekly unquestioning of all matters pertaining treatment - unsolicited psychotherapy from an emotionally labile nurse, insulin injections and electro-convulsive therapy - all alluded to, but never elaborated in detail. Anti-psychotic treatment was in its infancy during the 1950s, and the author makes tentative protestations against the under-reported toxicities of the day, while acknowledging its efficacy - Josephine's weight gain while she gets better, and Alasdair's sexual dysfunction during periods he is stable enough to develop a relationship. Later, Josephine rebels against the protective environment of the hospital, and provides my favourite quote in the form of an accusation - "You cherish me as a diseased person".
I initially thought the title referred to Josephine's ill-adapted coping strategy - convulsive giggling at the most awkward moments. There is an actual "Ha-Ha" though, a sanctuary site where she gazes at the more picturesque, greener pasture beyond. It is perhaps a rather obvious metaphor for the yawning gap between sanity and madness, or for the psychological (even physical barrier) that the "normal-healthy" put up against the "abnormal-unwell". When Alasdair leads her to the opposite bank one day, she finds that being on the other side is equally bleak and unrewarding.
This novel suggests no answers, but its fragile prose highlights the complications of a mentally unwell young woman - sexual vulnerability, placid acceptance, a fine brain from Oxbridge delegated to the mundane just because of a mental illness. 4 stars, for though it was written 50 years ago, it still reads like a valid, contemporary masterpiece of today.
Josephine exhibits classic features of schizophrenia, though her diagnosis is shrouded in secrecy. She lives in apprehensive horror she may be labelled with what is believed to be the worst-case scenario. Just as she yearns to be led blindly "without thinking or feeling" by the suavely detached Alasdair ("...I'll blindfold myself then shall I"), she is meekly unquestioning of all matters pertaining treatment - unsolicited psychotherapy from an emotionally labile nurse, insulin injections and electro-convulsive therapy - all alluded to, but never elaborated in detail. Anti-psychotic treatment was in its infancy during the 1950s, and the author makes tentative protestations against the under-reported toxicities of the day, while acknowledging its efficacy - Josephine's weight gain while she gets better, and Alasdair's sexual dysfunction during periods he is stable enough to develop a relationship. Later, Josephine rebels against the protective environment of the hospital, and provides my favourite quote in the form of an accusation - "You cherish me as a diseased person".
I initially thought the title referred to Josephine's ill-adapted coping strategy - convulsive giggling at the most awkward moments. There is an actual "Ha-Ha" though, a sanctuary site where she gazes at the more picturesque, greener pasture beyond. It is perhaps a rather obvious metaphor for the yawning gap between sanity and madness, or for the psychological (even physical barrier) that the "normal-healthy" put up against the "abnormal-unwell". When Alasdair leads her to the opposite bank one day, she finds that being on the other side is equally bleak and unrewarding.
This novel suggests no answers, but its fragile prose highlights the complications of a mentally unwell young woman - sexual vulnerability, placid acceptance, a fine brain from Oxbridge delegated to the mundane just because of a mental illness. 4 stars, for though it was written 50 years ago, it still reads like a valid, contemporary masterpiece of today.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 7, 2025
Electroshocks en lobotomie werden in de Engelse psychiatrische centra nog volop toegepast eind jaren 50. Jennifer Dawson schreef dit boek in 1961. In haar nawoord uit 1984 geeft Dawson mee dat de kritiek op psychiatrie en het invoeren van de mental health act (1958) waarin nadruk werd gelegd op vrijwillige opname en deinstitutionalisering nog moest ontplooid worden. Ook het feminisme zat in die periode in een stille periode. Toch behandelt het boek "De haha" al deze thema's, maar dan wel op een heel literaire manier waardoor dit boek tijdloos is. Het hoofdpersonage, Josephine Traughton, zoekt naar een manier waarop ze met zichzelf en met de anderen in contact kan komen. De liefdevolle benadering van een medepatiënt speelt daarin een grote rol. Ze voelt weer doordat hij haar op sleeptouw neemt. Als hij verdwijnt dan lijkt het alsof het gemis van hem haar een kompas heeft gegeven.
"ik vroeg me af welke woorden de woorden waren, de dingen die iets droegen, de woorden die ertoe deden en die je kwalificeerden voor de wereld van andere mensen" (p.87)
"ik vroeg me af welke woorden de woorden waren, de dingen die iets droegen, de woorden die ertoe deden en die je kwalificeerden voor de wereld van andere mensen" (p.87)
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October 29, 2025Good book
January 20, 2024
A forgotten masterpiece . Written about a time when huge mental asylums housed any number of societes' misfits and transgressors we follow the precariousness existence Of Josephine Traughten. An only child with traits we might now recognise as being on the autism spectrum she falls into a mental breakdown while at Oxford University and following the death of her mother , her sole parent .
The impulse of her nurses and doctors is to coax her back into normality through a combination of work experience and social interactions . This is preferable to the cosh of paraldehyde . A job cataloguing papers in the attic of a middle class couple is perfect , offering a solitary space but an experience at a party of an old acquaintance proves more disturbing .. Elizabeth , naive and disinterested in fashion , make up and conventional female roles, simply because she can't understand the rules or the point , is nervous and detached . She is a simple romantic with a rich and unique fantasy life , unable to read the world about her but not unhappy until she is completely alone in the world .She forms a friendship with another inmate, Alastair , which blooms into intimacy. They meet regularly in the ha ha , the ditch that separates the hospital from the town, symbolic bas although a boundary it is invisible until you happen upon it , suggesting the boundary between the well and the ill is likewise less than obvious . After a fabulous and sublime few weeks tragedy ensues .
It's a brave novel , giving voice to a singular woman with no advocate who is devastated by grief . Her illness , tellingly , has no label and bursts out into chaos with the combined trigger of leaving home and bereavement .
This Is a time when mental illness was hidden , whispered about in quiet asides and generally viewed as a failure of character . Women were far from liberated and expected to settle into the role of homemaker after making a good marriage .
The description of the experience of hallucinations is revelatory , her experience of catatonia is particularly moving, as is the commonplace use of ECT and occasionally , lobotomy .A supporting character here is the ward sister , a refugee from Germany , deeply sympathetic but also strangely needy , as if damaged by her own wartime experience .
Soon after this novel was published a national critique of treatment of people with mental illness started a move towards the closure of these enormous warehouses so this novel stands witness to a time long gone but still confronts us with questions about categories of difference and compliance with norms . And there's something too in the imperfect sanctuary of the asylum , it's spacious grounds and earnest activities , that allows a space for recovery . Where can people go now to retreat from the cruel realities of our world ?
The impulse of her nurses and doctors is to coax her back into normality through a combination of work experience and social interactions . This is preferable to the cosh of paraldehyde . A job cataloguing papers in the attic of a middle class couple is perfect , offering a solitary space but an experience at a party of an old acquaintance proves more disturbing .. Elizabeth , naive and disinterested in fashion , make up and conventional female roles, simply because she can't understand the rules or the point , is nervous and detached . She is a simple romantic with a rich and unique fantasy life , unable to read the world about her but not unhappy until she is completely alone in the world .She forms a friendship with another inmate, Alastair , which blooms into intimacy. They meet regularly in the ha ha , the ditch that separates the hospital from the town, symbolic bas although a boundary it is invisible until you happen upon it , suggesting the boundary between the well and the ill is likewise less than obvious . After a fabulous and sublime few weeks tragedy ensues .
It's a brave novel , giving voice to a singular woman with no advocate who is devastated by grief . Her illness , tellingly , has no label and bursts out into chaos with the combined trigger of leaving home and bereavement .
This Is a time when mental illness was hidden , whispered about in quiet asides and generally viewed as a failure of character . Women were far from liberated and expected to settle into the role of homemaker after making a good marriage .
The description of the experience of hallucinations is revelatory , her experience of catatonia is particularly moving, as is the commonplace use of ECT and occasionally , lobotomy .A supporting character here is the ward sister , a refugee from Germany , deeply sympathetic but also strangely needy , as if damaged by her own wartime experience .
Soon after this novel was published a national critique of treatment of people with mental illness started a move towards the closure of these enormous warehouses so this novel stands witness to a time long gone but still confronts us with questions about categories of difference and compliance with norms . And there's something too in the imperfect sanctuary of the asylum , it's spacious grounds and earnest activities , that allows a space for recovery . Where can people go now to retreat from the cruel realities of our world ?
October 19, 2025
3,5☆
The writer Ilse Josepha Lazaroms compared Jennifer Dawson's The Ha-Ha (1961) in an article in De Groene Amsterdammer to writings of Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf.
I definitely agree that The Ha-Ha fits with the works of these authors. The novel contains important themes such as the 'female psyche', the mental health care system after WWII and the restrictive/oppressive conventions of British (elitist) society. The narrator, Josephine, definitely experiences how badly people with mental health problems, especially women, were treated and misunderstood. Luckily, times have changed and new generations have brought new perspectives on mental illness and health. However and unfortunately, the topics of this novel are still relevant today.
The narrator suffers from schizophrenia (and, in a sense, she suffers from the mental health care system, the rules of society and the stigma around her illness too). Her almost constant hallucinations and imaginations make it difficult to read between the lines sometimes. It also wasn't always clear to me how something that happened made Josephine feel, although I believe a lot of the times she experiences apathy or distraction. Because of this, it didn't impact me as deeply as Josephine's story perhaps deserved. I think that, for me, this novel would have worked better if it was written in third person.
The writer Ilse Josepha Lazaroms compared Jennifer Dawson's The Ha-Ha (1961) in an article in De Groene Amsterdammer to writings of Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf.
I definitely agree that The Ha-Ha fits with the works of these authors. The novel contains important themes such as the 'female psyche', the mental health care system after WWII and the restrictive/oppressive conventions of British (elitist) society. The narrator, Josephine, definitely experiences how badly people with mental health problems, especially women, were treated and misunderstood. Luckily, times have changed and new generations have brought new perspectives on mental illness and health. However and unfortunately, the topics of this novel are still relevant today.
The narrator suffers from schizophrenia (and, in a sense, she suffers from the mental health care system, the rules of society and the stigma around her illness too). Her almost constant hallucinations and imaginations make it difficult to read between the lines sometimes. It also wasn't always clear to me how something that happened made Josephine feel, although I believe a lot of the times she experiences apathy or distraction. Because of this, it didn't impact me as deeply as Josephine's story perhaps deserved. I think that, for me, this novel would have worked better if it was written in third person.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
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January 1, 2026
Author Jennifer Dawson knows what she is talking about when writing about the experiences within an asylum because she was once a resident of one. In her book The Ha-Ha Josephine, our FMC, does not fit within her world. She laughs at the wrong times and sees things that are not there or are there but not as you should. Plagued by Schizophrenia the entire novel reads like a emotional fever dream where the world is upside down but is it the world or is it you? Sharp and witty, and originally written in 1961, The Ha-Ha continues to stand the test of time and relevance.
Thank you to Scribner Books for the gifted copy.
Thank you to Scribner Books for the gifted copy.
November 22, 2025
“Mine is not going to be that kind of existence. I want to live, to feel. I was born for something more than mere sanity. I was born for so much joy… My life is far different than you could imagine.”
4 fiction & reality collide stars
Like the main character, Dawson was also institutionalized when she was young. Her way of portraying what Josephine is feeling is poetic and beautiful. You are rooting for her the entire time.
4 fiction & reality collide stars
Like the main character, Dawson was also institutionalized when she was young. Her way of portraying what Josephine is feeling is poetic and beautiful. You are rooting for her the entire time.
January 5, 2026
Written in 1961 yet equally as relevant today, this novel serves as a critique of the institutionalization of mental illness at the convenience of a society which doesn’t know how to treat people who don’t conform to so-called normalcy. I enjoyed the protagonist, Josephine, and her joie de vivre despite the situation in which she finds herself in. Long live the pursuit of joy!
December 2, 2025
A recent mention in the New York Times book pages of this as a “lost classic” (published in 1960) led me to read it. As the author makes clear in an afterword, this story of an Oxford student who has a breakdown and is institutionalized is semi-autobiographical. She writes feelingly of her very confused mental state, the hospital and the medical treatment she received, and it was one of the earliest of the books written about the subject.
January 7, 2026
“I wanted the knack of existing. I did not know the rules.”
May 25, 2025
Goede kritiek op hoe we naar mentale ziektes kijken en ze definiëren.
‘Ik vroeg me af welke woorden de woorden waren, de dingen die iets droegen, de woorden die ertoe deden en die je kwalificeerden voor de wereld van andere mensen.’
‘Het is de afschuwelijke macht van bezit, van het zien van de wereld als een inventaris, een groot blik waar een bepaald aantal dingen in zit, en andere mensen als een hoeveelheid blikopeners om dat blik voor jou op de juiste manier open te maken. Het is allemaal zo benauwd, zo verdoofd, zo onwerkelijk.’
‘Ik vroeg me af welke woorden de woorden waren, de dingen die iets droegen, de woorden die ertoe deden en die je kwalificeerden voor de wereld van andere mensen.’
‘Het is de afschuwelijke macht van bezit, van het zien van de wereld als een inventaris, een groot blik waar een bepaald aantal dingen in zit, en andere mensen als een hoeveelheid blikopeners om dat blik voor jou op de juiste manier open te maken. Het is allemaal zo benauwd, zo verdoofd, zo onwerkelijk.’
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