4⭐️ Something about books with women in mental hospitals just does it for me. What that says about me we’re just going to ignore…

Seeing that The Ha-Ha was compared to Sylvia Plath’s work instantly got me intrigued. The Bell Jar is one of my all time favorite books so I had high expectations going into this.

The Ha-Ha is about a young woman, Josephine, who’s currently in a mental hospital. We follow her as she tries to get back into “the real world”.

Josephine struggles with her purpose in life. She doesn’t want to be defined by her illness, by being “insane”. She wants to live, to experience joy.
Her journey to being “free” felt so realistic and understandable . Especially towards the end of the story I felt so connected to her and was rooting for her so much.

“Do you think I care whether the Doctors and hospital board decide I am sane or insane? I don’t care tuppence about nice quiet friends. 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.”

The book was originally published in 1961 and the subjects that are being talked about within this book are so important, especially for that time.

I find Dawson’s prose at times chaotic and not as well developed/poetic as Plath’s. Which to me makes sense. Josephine to me is more a young woman whereas I see Esther as a more developed and wiser/older woman. The books are similar in storyline but different in writing style. The Ha-Ha focuses more on the experiences and The Bell Jar mostly reflects upon everything that has happened. That’s what reading it felt like to me at least.

I’m comparing both books because I both really enjoyed them and the similarities and differences are simply very interesting to me.

All in all, I just really enjoyed reading this book. It’s a short yet powerful read and one I highly recommend.

“‘I was born for something else. I was born for life, for joy, for . . .’ But it was not true. I stuck my teeth into the dusty, smooth bark of the tree. I ran my mouth up and down it searchingly, and cried and cried: ‘I am alive, aren’t I? Aren’t I, even if I don’t know the rules?’ I appealed, and cried more because there was no answer.”

Thank you, NetGalley and the publisher, for the arc

Oh no, it's one of those books. The ones you enjoy, but can't for the life of you form a decent sentence to explain why.
Maybe it's the unusual voice of our main character.
Or the setting?
Or a look at mental health back in the day?
Whatever it was, I did enjoy it.

Thank you to Faber and Faber and NetGalley for the e-arc in exchange for an honest review.

The Ha-Ha follows Josephine, a 23 year old woman in the early 1960s, who has been diagnosed with schizophrenia and institutionalised. Very character-driven and hard to follow at times, as to be expected from the nature of the narrator.

An interesting modern classic being republished by Faber and Faber (available from 31st July 2025). For fans of ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’, ‘The Bell Jar’, and ‘Girl, Interrupted’.

I think The Ha-Ha by Jennifer Dawson is a novel that fans of Janet Frame and Sylvia Plath will enjoy being able to have the experience of discovering.

an incredibly poignant exploration of mental health treatment. The protagonist is committed a mental hospital away from her university after a mental breakdown when her mother dies. It gives this one woman a voice as we see her battle with her mental health and try to recover.

As I was reading this all I could think about was The Bell Jar by Plath (my favourite book ever) and if that doesn't convince you to read it then I don't know what will. How was this never on my radar before?!
It is a beautifully restrained yet deeply unsettling novel that offers an intimate look into the fragmented consciousness of a young woman, Josephine, grappling with mental illness. The writing is to the point and no nonsense. Josephine's narration draws us into her psychological disorientation.
I found the likeness to The Bell Jar comes from the alienation of women in this time whose minds don't conform to 'the norm'.
This is short but impactful.

First published in 1961 and winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, this short novel is an interesting comparison to other books from the same era which are set in mental hospitals. The staff in this one are kind, though patronising, and are doing their best to provide treatment according to standards of the time. The author, Jennifer Dawson (1929 - 2000) had experience in mental hospitals as both a patient and a social worker.

The book is narrated by Josephine, a young woman who had a breakdown after struggling at Oxford University and the sudden death of her mother. After spending time on a locked ward, she has recovered somewhat and is allowed to leave during the day for a job cataloguing books. She is due to leave the hospital for good, but coping with the outside world is difficult because she doesn't fit into society and never knows what to say. The title of the book has two meanings: her tendency to laugh at the absurdity of everything and the wall behind the hospital where she and a male patient meet and eventually form a relationship.

Described as a 'lost classic', I think this book deserves to be more widely known. I found it a compelling read and there are some very unusual perspectives. I felt there were flashes of brilliances in the description which made the novel worth reading. Some of it didn't make much sense to me and I'm not sure if that was the intention, to reflect the characters' thinking. There are also references of an academic nature and to the era, which I didn't get. I was annoyed by the repetition of words, such as 'grimace' and 'grin' (and variations of these) which are used 11 times each! A new, named character was introduced just before the end of the story, something I always disapprove of. Yet these are small issues, compared to the book's overall achievement of questioning the role of women in society and what happens to those who don't conform.

This edition of the book has an introduction by Daisy Johnson and includes the author's afterword from 1984, which is very illuminating.

This is a powerful novel about a young woman with schizophrenia, being treated in a ghastly way in a mental health hospital (if you could even call it that.) Bleak, powerful, poignant but still full of hope and the yearning to live a full life - our protagonist, Josephine, tries to claw back 'normal life' by attending a party with former Oxford students and meeting a man who opens up her world, even if this is for a short time.

When he suddenly disappears, her world is tilted back into its original axis. She spends all her time shut away, back in the institution, where she is pumped full of drugs and fears she is growing fat as she never strays now from the hospital walls.

I can see this novel as being nothing short of ground breaking when it was published - in an era which had yet to make so much more progress in terms of understanding mental health and maintaining a society who could speak openly about it. Reading it today, although there is still so much stigma attached to schizophrenia in particular, it is still shocking, bleak and eye opening.

I loved the writing style and how the story is told in the first person - as it gives the reader no room to hide. The sense of hope and yearning for a different life, yet Josephine never being able to fully escape outside of the institution's four walls, is a haunting message that will stay with me for a long time.

"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."

What's so heartbreaking about this story is that Josephine had a taste of how marvellous and freeing life could be, but was kept against her will in confinement, never being able to live as fully as she intended to.

Thank you NetGalley for providing me with an e-arc in exchange for an honest review. And thank you Faber and Faber for choosing to re publish such an important classic, made fresh for modern eyes. This book will always be important.

Jennifer Dawson’s The Ha-Ha, originally published in the 1960s, is a powerful tragicomic about a young woman re-entering society after a stay in a psychiatric hospital. The writing is curious in its approach of representing that uneasy space between isolation and belonging and the lonely task of returning to everyday life: “I wanted the knack of existing. I did not know the rules.”

Dawson beautifully evokes the surreal, with melancholy-drenched references to nature and landscapes: “The sunshine had become a kind of habit.” Introspective and profound comments on living sharply contrast moments of the mundane: “it seemed so funny being alive at all”. At all times, the reader is intimately situated in Jospehine’s mind, but is never quite allowed to see all of her. A forgotten classic that still speaks clearly to the pressures of modern life and the longing to feel real in a world that often feels nonsensical.