A celebration of the life and work of the British writer Jennifer Dawson
Hospital Wedding is the title story from a collection of 12 short stories published by Quartet in 1978. In this story Dawson returns to some of the themes of the Ha-Ha.
Hospital Wedding is set in a psychiatric hospital which is celebrating its two hundredth anniversary. The story tells of a young doctor who tries to outwit the system which is moving remorselessly towards the lobotomising of a middle-aged female patient.
Other stories in the collection present unsettling experiences or scenarios at the edges of the surreal yet strangely familiar; In Hysteria or Raising the Ante, an office clerk barricades himself in his room, intending to starve to death but, as always, he is comically misunderstood. In A Kind of Freedom, a woman discovers that a stranger has sold her body to a hospital so that she merely remains it as a life tenant. In The Bleeding Hearts, a black girl comes and goes in the household of an ex-patriate liberal Rhodesian couple, causing them much perplexity.
This engaging collection of short stories is currently out of print.
Hospital Wedding