I requested The Ballroom by Anna Hope from the library because it had been enjoyed by Jo @ The Book Jotter, you can read what she thought here.

Anyway, I had only skimmed the review as I had decided to read the book, so when I began to actually read it I wasn’t at all sure it was up my street, I thought it might be a wee bit too grim for my taste, with its setting of a mental hospital in 1911 but I ended up reading The Ballroom really quickly as I could hardly put it down.

Ella is a young woman who has worked in a cotton mill in Yorkshire since she was a child. She can’t even read because she was too exhausted to learn anything after a long day in the mill. The room she works in only has dirty windows high up in the walls and she longs to see the sky, the horrendous atmosphere of the mill is suddenly more than she can bear and she flings something at the window, smashing it. Obviously she must be mad – so her employers think – and she is carted off to Sharston Lunatic Asylum.

Of course there’s nothing mental about Ella at all but the asylum is enough to drive anyone mad, especially as the women are never allowed outside for fresh air, the thing that Ella most needs. She is stuck inside, working in the steaming hot laundry during the summer of 1911, an amazingly hot one with temperatures staying in the 90s F for weeks.

Once a week some of the inmates are allowed to go to a dance in the asylum ballroom, it’s the only time that the sexes are allowed to meet and Ella’s contact with John a fellow inmate leads to disaster when one of the doctors discovers their relationship.

Doctor Fuller is a young man who has been a disappointment to his parents who had expected him to have a high-flying career in medicine, but his love of music and lack of studying had meant that he failed exams and ended up working in the asylum. He thought that he could help his patients through music therapy and he was getting good results but an interest in eugenics means he stops all his therapy work and removes everything that the patients enjoy. His decisions are all tied up with his own disgust at his seemingly warped sexuality. Doctor Fuller is in fact more screwed up than many of the asylum inmates.

It’s apparent that a lot of the people in the asylum are there just because they have ‘lost it’ for a moment and done something that if they had been wealthy would just have them marked down as being a bit eccentric.

Anna Hope’s writing style is poetic at times and I was impressed by quite a few unusual words the meaning of which was usually obvious from the context but I did look a few up, just to make sure they weren’t made up. Anna Hope does write in her notes at the back of the book that she used some Yorkshire dialect words. The book seems to be well researched on what was going on in Britain in 1911, riots and strikes apparently and a sweltering long summer. This is just the second book by Anna Hope and I intend to read the first one soon, it’s called Wake, have any of you read it?

Anna Hope is apparently also an actress and has appeared in some episodes of Doctor Who.