Available:*
Library | Collection | Collection | Call Number | Status |
---|---|---|---|---|
Searching... Betty Rodriguez Library (Fresno Co.) | Searching... Unknown | Adult Fiction Area | HOPE AN Ballroo | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... San Joaquin Branch (Fresno Co.) | Searching... Unknown | Adult Fiction Area | HOPE AN Ballroo | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Selma Branch Library (Fresno Co.) | Searching... Unknown | Adult Fiction Area | HOPE AN Ballroo | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
A searing novel of forbidden love on the Yorkshire moors--"a British version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest " ( The Times U.K.)--from the author of the critically acclaimed debut Wake
England, 1911. At Sharston Asylum, men and women are separated by thick walls and barred windows. But on Friday nights, they are allowed to mingle in the asylum's magnificent ballroom. From its balconies and vaulted ceilings to its stained glass, the ballroom is a sanctuary. Onstage, the orchestra plays Strauss and Debussy while the patients twirl across the gleaming dance floor.
Amid this heady ambience, John Mulligan and Ella Fay first meet. John is a sure-footed dancer with a clouded, secretive face; Ella is as skittish as a colt, with her knobby knees and flushed cheeks. Despite their grim circumstances, the unlikely pair strikes up a tenuous courtship. During the week, he writes letters smuggled to her in secret, unaware that Ella cannot read. She enlists a friend to read them aloud and gains resolve from the force of John's words, each sentence a stirring incantation. And, of course, there's always the promise of the ballroom.
Then one of them receives an unexpected opportunity to leave Sharston for good. As Anna Hope's powerful, bittersweet novel unfolds, John and Ella face an agonizing dilemma: whether to cling to familiar comforts or to confront a new world--living apart, yet forever changed.
Praise for The Ballroom
" The Ballroom successfully blends historical research with emotional intelligence to explore the tensions and trials of the human condition with grace and insight." -- New York Times Book Review
"Part historical novel and part romance, The Ballroom paints an incredibly rich portrait of the mentally stable forced to live in an asylum. [Anna] Hope transports readers inside the asylum, to feel the thick humidity of the stale summer air of the day room, and the gritty and brutal reality inside those walls." -- Booklist
"A compelling cast of emotionally resonant characters, as well as a bittersweet climax, render Hope's second novel a powerful, memorable experience." -- Publishers Weekly
"Hope's writing is consistently beautiful. . . . Recommended for readers who enjoy historical fiction by Sarah Waters or Emma Donoghue." -- Library Journal
"A beautifully wrought novel, a tender, heartbreaking and insightful exploration of the longings that survive in the most inhospitable environments." -- Sunday Express
" The Ballroom has all the intensity and lyricism of [Anna] Hope's debut, Wake . At its heart is a tender and absorbing love story." -- Daily Mail
"Compelling and masterful . . . Anna Hope has proven once again that she is a luminary in historical fiction. . . . She delivers profound, poignant narratives that stir the emotions." -- Yorkshire Post
"As with Hope's highly acclaimed debut novel, Wake, the writing is elegant and insightful; she writes beautifully about human emotion, landscape and weather." --The Observer
"A brilliantly moving meditation on what it means to be 'insane' in a cruel world . . . All the characters are vividly and sensitively drawn. . . . Deeply moving." --The Irish Times
Author Notes
Anna Hope is the author of Wake, her acclaimed debut novel. She studied English at Oxford, attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, then received an M.A. in creative writing at Birkbeck, University of London. She lives in London.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Patients in an asylum in 1911 find hope and redemption amid the bleakest circumstances in Hope's heartbreaking second novel (following Wake). After a violent confrontation at the mill where she works, Ella Fay finds herself confined in the Sharston Asylum, a bleak institution on the edge of the Yorkshire moors where female patients are confined indoors, subjected to hard labor, and bullied by belligerent nurses. The one bright spot in the patients' week is the weekly dance thrown in the asylum's ballroom. Presided over by attending physician (and amateur musician) Charles Fulller, the dances are the one opportunity male and female patients have to interact. It's here that Ella meets John Mulligan, an Irishman confined to the hospital for melancholia after the death of his wife and child. The two strike up a passionate affair, facilitated by the clandestine exchange of letters. Such a romance runs counter to Dr. Fuller's philosophies on the treatment and welfare of his charges, which, to the modern reader, range from confusing ("excessive reading is dangerous for the female mind") to outright backward (forced sterilization). And as Dr. Fuller's own grip on reality begins to loosen, Ella and John's chances for a happy life-together or apart-begin slipping away. Though the subject matter is occasionally difficult, a compelling cast of emotionally resonant characters, as well as a bittersweet climax, render Hope's second novel a powerful, memorable experience. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
In 1911, upon a windy moor in Yorkshire, England, sits an enormous facility that houses society's most derelict: the poor and the insane. Sharston Asylum is home to thousands of men and women committed against their will. By modern medical standards, treatment and consideration of the involuntarily committed on the eve of WWI was barbaric. Patients perceived three options: escape, die, or convince someone, somehow, that they were sane enough to leave. From the doctors' perspective, treatments for the mentally ill included isolation and forced sterilization. However, Dr. Charles Fuller has his beliefs and methods tested as he becomes infatuated with two of his patients, Ella and John, who against all odds grow close after they first meet when Ella is trying to escape. Part historical novel and part romance, The Ballroom paints an incredibly rich portrait of the mentally stable forced to live in an asylum. Hope (Wake, 2014) transports readers inside the asylum, to feel the thick humidity of the stale summer air of the day room, and the gritty and brutal reality inside those walls.--Spanner, Alison Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
SMALL AND FRIGHTENED, Ella Fay was only 8 years old when she reported for work in the spinning room of a British textile mill. The hours were long, the pay low and the overseers cruel. "Why are the windows all covered up?" she asked, wideeyed, on her first day. "Why d'you think? You're not here to admire the view," one of the older girls told her sharply, smacking her on the back of the head. And then one morning in 1911, after 12 years toiling in the noisy, dirty half light, 20-year-old Ella broke a window to see the sky. Which meant, of course, that she was insane. So she was carted off to Sharston Asylum, a dark-walled, chaotic home for some 2,000 "feebleminded and chronic paupers" on the bleak Yorkshire moors. Out of the frying pan, into the fire. That's where the action in Anna Hope's second novel begins. Set in a madhouse in an era when straitjackets and feeding tubes represented the cutting edge of psychiatric health care, "The Ballroom" is a provocative account of the brutal effects of industrialization, poverty, sexism and misguided social policy on the hearts and minds of working people, and on women in particular. Like the real-life Yorkshire mental hospital where the author's great-great-grandfather died a broken man in 1918, the fictional Sharston's most impressive feature is the massive, ornately decorated ballroom where patients deemed well enough meet weekly for therapeutic dances. Surrounded by the ballroom's arched windows, Ella falls in love with another patient, John Mulligan, an Irish day laborer who has been virtually silent since the death of his infant daughter and the collapse of his marriage. Ella and John's stories are interwoven with that of Dr. Charles Fuller, the book's most complicated character. Flabby, weak, a frustrated musician tormented by latent homosexual desires, Fuller becomes fascinated by the eugenics movement and its tantalizing promise of a world filled with superior men. It was a surprisingly popular notion at the time: Even the home secretary, Winston Churchill, showed considerable enthusiasm for the logic of sterilization as a final solution to the "pauper lunatic" problem. The irony here, of course, is that the doctor himself is a poor specimen, while some of his patients, like John, are in perfect physical condition. It's a variation on a perennially thorny question: How different, really, are the patients from those who run the asylum? The painful answers are given another dimension through Hope's evocative descriptions of weather and landscape: Rain falls in "small squally blasts," daffodils push up from the earth with "blind hope." A heat wave almost becomes a character in its own right: "The sky above was blue, deep blue, but it hummed and buzzed, as if the blue were only a sheet and behind it, waiting to be rended free, lay black and boiling weather." Dialect is also used to great effect, creating a powerful sense of place: the gray "puckly" sky; the "poor eejits" in the washing shed preparing for the weekly dance; the "reasty" stink of the asylum's day room; Ella and her anorexic friend, Clem, "nantling" up and down a narrow stone yard for their half-hour of daily recreation. There are some stock characters in the mix - the brutal enforcer, Jim Brandt, for one, a violent ex-patient hired to "keep the chronics in line" - and the plot, for much of the book, has the earnest, orderly momentum of a model railway layout. But the gripping final chapters ramp up the suspense as the narrative careers toward a heart-wrenching conclusion. As in her first novel, "Wake," which examined the devastating aftermath of World War I and the events surrounding the entombment of Britain's unknown soldier in Westminster Abbey in 1920, "The Ballroom" successfully blends historical research with emotional intelligence to explore the tensions and trials of the human condition with grace and insight. SARAH FERGUSON has written for Elle, Vogue, The Guardian and New York magazine, among other publications.