Who laughs last?
The Ha-Ha by Jennifer Dawson (Scribner, 2025)
Reviewed by Brody Eldridge
Josephine Traughton reads English at Oxford University. She specializes in Anglo-Saxon literature, being "keen" on the Ormulum, and is a promising young mind. She also struggles with laughing uncontrollably and seeing imaginary animals.
The Ha-Ha is a short, at times nonlinear, novel told in the first person. Josephine, the main character, is institutionalized for her fits of laughter which she cannot control. While these occur mostly in private, the story's inciting incident occurs at a party in Oxford, which is what leads her to the mental hospital where the novel takes place. Most of the novel revolves around her attempts to be "regraded" as fit to leave the hospital. While she is not entirely confined and has wandering privileges outside of the hospital, she initially spends most of her time working, cataloguing a retired colonel's library (work being an attempt at rehabilitation for Josephine). She also meets an someone who means the world to her.
The relationship at the core of the novel is between Josephine and a fellow male patient, Alasdair. Alasdair talks with a fresh breath of swagger, flare, and slang, always asking Josephine, "How are you ticking over these days? How is the big bad world treating you?" (11), and "How’s way out beyond?" (24). A characteristic passage reads: "'Hey! Ho!' he carolled. 'Hey ho the holly, this life is so jolly'" (47). A bit of an Oscar Wilde type, Alasdair helps initiate Josephine "into a new life"¾into love¾while she resides in the mental hospital (48). However, while the two find companionship gallivanting around, going dancing, starting fires by a river, and dining in the pub, Alasdair is eventually discharged and leaves without telling Josephine, emotionally abandoning her after consummating their relationship.
Josephine's narration is sensuous and tactile as she describes her life in the hospital and her daily comings and goings. Many have compared The Ha-Ha and Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar (1963). However, while both are first-person narrated books about the treatment of women's mental health in Britain and America (respectively), Dawson's style is distinct from Plath's. Where Plath's main character seems more confident and prefers to use shorter sentences, Dawson's Josephine voices an uncertainty in herself more often, and usually in longer, flowing sentences. This approach in style, including the emphasis on the senses, is evident in how she details her work for the colonel:
"Then as I paused to switch on the electric-fan, I would hear rising up the shaft of the stairs the clear, rounded voice of Mrs. Maybury, commenting on the morning’s post or the front page of the paper, remarking on a cobweb on the ceiling, or pausing over a vase of dead flowers, and as I prepared to inscribe a number on to the spine of a book, or started separating geology from ecology in the vast section on natural history, her voice and her comments would float nearer and nearer till she was standing there in the doorway, small and smiling and weatherbeaten, in a broken straw hat, leaning half out, half in; half in sun, half in shadow, against the lintel . . .'" (7)
The images are an immersion into Josephine's space: the physical description of sound in the house, as it "rises;" the tactile nature of the book's spine, the dead flowers, the cobweb. One can imagine how it feels to be "weatherbeaten," standing "half in sun, half in shadow" on a hot day, something Mrs. Maybury, the colonel's wife, immediately comments on, calling the library a "furnace" (7). Josephine describes the house's "sweating roof." After work she prefers to walk back to the hospital "between the black-cottonwood trees that smelt of honey" (7). Josephine's focus on the physical continues to the novel's end, as she emphasizes the feeling, the sounds, and the smells of her world despite her inability to understand her own mental state.
The ghost of Josephine's mother haunts the novel. It is another similarity to Plath's Bell Jar. Plath's Esther, like Josephine, has only her widowed mother. Josephine's mother, though, is both present in life and death. In the novel's present time, Josephine bumps into an old friend from Oxford who invites her to a party. And yet, "There was also another thing that made me hesitate and fumble with the invitation," she explains:
"As I have said, I was not very often invited to parties at Oxford. Only one invitation in fact had ever come my way, and that was the time that Mother had died. Had not the Sister instructed me to look at the future, not at the past? So I pushed aside the invitation. . . And yet the protests faded out and I was left with the memory of that other invitation that had come just a few days before Mother had died and I came to Gardenwell Park." (18)
Josephine's narrative skips back in time to when her mother was still alive, and Josephine details unknowingly how her mother's presence was stifling to her and her laughing condition. In a scene from the past, Josephine desires a new dress for the party she is invited to: "it was too difficult to explain why I wanted a certain kind of dress, not a quiet wool one that would do for Christmas and when the cousins came to the house" (21). Her mother "seems" to understand, letting Josephine purchase the dress she desires. Yet, "I never wore it, because it was that night that Mother had the accident with the electric blanket" (24).
There is palpable tension in Josephine's recollection of the past and it always stays with her. Perhaps it even explains Josephine's inability and failed attempts to fit in with the “real” world. Alasdair picks up on Josephine's indeterminate relationship with her mother, asking if Josephine hates her mother. Josephine triumphantly declares, "I am glad! I’m glad she’s dead. The future can begin" (27). While this declaration is seemingly conclusive, the future Josephine works out throughout the novel is less clear, both in meaning and how it might come to be.
Reissued in the UK by Faber in July 2025 and in the US by Scribner in November 2025, The Ha-Ha is Jennifer Dawson's (1929-2000) debut novel. Originally released in 1961 to acclaim, The Ha-Ha won the James Tait Black Prize, and while "resurrected briefly by Virago Modern Classics in 1985, is now, after many unconscionable years by the wayside, republished" (Catherine Taylor, TLS 2025).
Reviews of The Ha-Ha tend to focus on the comparison between Dawson and her novel and Plath and Plath's Bell Jar. We know that Plath read Dawson's novel soon before she died, and then there are ripe comparisons between the content of Plath's Bell Jar and Dawson's Ha-Ha, as explored and considered above. There are biographical parallels, as well. Dawson's experience in Oxford mirrors Plath's experience in Cambridge. Reviewers and scholars also note the connection of the novel's title to both place and condition. The ha-ha is both a geographical place and Josephine’s condition. British author, Daisy Johnson, in the new foreword for the Faber edition of The Ha-Ha, writes, "The ha-ha then is also a lonely place, somewhere it is possible, and easy, to jump, but not simple to escape. The ha-ha is also the sound of Josephine’s laughter which barks loudly through the text, startling those around her; at times even startling us" (6). Lilian R. Furst notes this connection as well in her 1999 book, Just Talk: Narratives of Psychotherapy. "The ha-ha is a refuge for [Josephine], a haven of privacy" (101), Furst describes: "But on a secondary, more sinister level ha-ha designates too the narrator's disconcerting propensity to incongruous laughter. For etymologically ha-ha is thought to derive from ha! an exclamation of surprise" (101-102).
While the existing literary criticism on Dawson's book is scant, it does manage to touch on, but not fully explore, the relationship between Josephine and "the world." It is this relationship of space and fitting in that is crucial to understanding The Ha-Ha. "The Sister, the Doctor and the social worker" help Josephine find a job so that she can get "back to the ‘real world’ as though there were two; one good and one to be avoided" (7). Yet, as made obvious by the novel’s narrative, Josephine feels most comfortable in the world which should be "avoided."
In Just Talk, Furst's chapter on The Ha-Ha focuses on Josephine's inability to talk appropriately, with others or through her internal turmoil. Furst points out that Josephine's "ineptitude makes her ludicrous in social situations," such as when Josephine attends the party (102). Josephine utilizes spatial terminology to describe her social alienation:
"Mouths clapped up and down; words shot in and out, but the room full of people seemed to have escaped me. I could not reach in to it. I tried to stretch out and get caught up in it, but each time my turn came to lay a contribution I found myself catapulted into this empty space in the middle of nothing." (35)
Like an atom, Josephine is catapulted into empty spaces, nothingness. The room of the party seemingly "escapes," because she either cannot literally position herself in the room or figuratively reach into the conversation. Josephine describes the dimensions of her body as stretched out, in order to convey the underlying inability to fit in (so to speak). Speech and space (including Josephine's many worlds) go hand in hand.
Josephine's "ineptitude" is really about Josephine's inability to "know the rules" of life, to harness "the knack of existing" (37). Existence is not an isolated experience; her confusion about “the rules" correlates to her inability "to fit in," to feel comfortable in the spaces of life marked by other people. Furst uses a pertinent example of "When [Josephine's] old college acquaintance, who sees her on the street, wants her to get into her car" so that the two can talk, which only leaves Josephine "petrified into utter silence" (103). Josephine's failure to speak is the result of a displacement from Josephine's world into the "real world," which leaves her in between the two, stuck in a liminal space.
An afterword, written in 1984 by Dawson, provides the historical context: "I wrote The Ha-Ha in 1960, a small cry a year after the Mental Health Act (1959) which was intended, among other things, to lead to a more liberal and open-door attitude towards mental illness" (69). In the novel, Josephine struggles silently with her fits of laughter and a feeling of being outcast from the wider world. Dawson's honest representation of Josephine's disposition, in the social context of the 1960s with all its baggage in terms of addressing these feelings and conditions in people, engenders a feeling of sympathy for Josephine, against the harsh conditions of the mental hospital.
While the high class, academic setting of these Oxford social lives might seem to challenge relatability, Josephine's character works best for relating exactly because she upsets that social world. It is her inability to be “proper” in the world, the isolation she feels as a result, that makes this read endearing. The Ha-Ha is worthy in its own right, justified by far more than Bell Jar comparisons.
How to be in the world? This question is more difficult now than it was in the 60s. Seemingly everyone now feels atomized, isolated within our own algorithms, and social customs and norms are not as codified and unified as they then were. Everyone has a different, curated understanding of what it means to fit in. In a different time than that of Dawson's The Ha-Ha, Josephine speaks to this struggle to find the right way to be. Perhaps Josephine's story confounds and questions the definition of what it means to be socially acceptable. It is now, in a time where conversations about mental health and its effect on society are more prevalent than in the 60s, that The Ha-Ha fits right in.
The idiom, "she who laughs last, laughs best," seems appropriate.
Brody C. J. Eldridge graduated in 2024 from Palm Beach Atlantic University with a BA in English. He was a 2024-2025 Fulbright English Teaching Assistant award winner for the Republic of Georgia. He is now pursuing a Master of Philosophy in English Studies at the University of Cambridge, where his research focuses on AI generated art and its relationship to contemporary and conventional literature.
