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,

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