At one point in Jennifer Dawson’s The Ha-Ha, the main character Josephine, who spends much of the novel in a psychiatric hospital, admits: “I wanted the knack of existing. I did not know the rules.”
Based on Dawson’s own breakdown and her time in Warneford Hospital in Oxford, The Ha-Ha is a novel that has often played second fiddle to that other great 1960s novel about a young woman’s mental diminishment – Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. But with the aid of Faber’s reliable Faber Editions imprint, as well as a jazzy new jacket, Dawson’s novel is back in bookshops and awaiting a new audience.
This isn’t to say The Ha-Ha is another one of those forgotten books known only to archivists and Oxfam volunteers. When it was released in 1961, it won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, an award that also went to the likes of Muriel Spark, Margaret Drabble and Elizabeth Bowen in that decade. It has a long lineage of fans, from Penelope Mortimer to Daisy Johnson.
Reading Dawson’s novel, it feels at once like one of those enduring 1960s novels, while the prose is spry and contemporary. Dawson’s descriptions of Josephine’s frequent breaks from reality are memorably surreal. Of the many books resurrected by Faber Editions since the imprint’s inception, The Ha-Ha reads the most like a genuinely underrated classic.
The Ha-Ha by Jennifer Dawson is out now (Faber & Faber, £9.99). You can buy it from the Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support Big Issue and independent bookshops.
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