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Dreaming of Dead People
This intimate portrait of a woman approaching middle age observes her thoughts and dreams as she tours Venice and the Scottish highlands. She recalls her country childhood, her relationship with her mother and describes an acute sexual frustration which pervades her lonely life.
160 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1979
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563 people want to read
About the author
Rosalind Belben
9 books13 followersRosalind Belben is an English novelist. She was born in 1941 in Dorset where she now lives. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Her novel Our Horses in Egypt won the James Tait Black Award in 2007. Among her other books are Bogies, Reuben Little Hero, The Limit, Dreaming of Dead People, and Hound Music.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 33 reviews
January 3, 2021
Rosalind Belben belongs with Christine Brooke-Rose, Kavan, Quin and Figes in the top rank of those experimental post-war writers who explored specifically and explicitly female perspectives which had hitherto been ignored (or dismissed). She writes of isolation, of sexual desire, of the physical sensations of the female orgasm, of conflicted longings and hatred of family and motherhood, of aging and of failure. She also writes beautifully, on the level of the sentence, and the music of her writing is captivating. She is also, unlike the others, still living and still writing, though I think her most recent books have taken a step towards the more "traditional".
Our narrator in this novel is a spinster (though only in her 30's – time has extended the cut-off date for this at least!) who has experienced much in her youth, has travelled and fucked and travelled and fucked and now suddenly finds herself " a shriveled person", she has "sucked herself dry", and she can no longer play those roles her youth and attractiveness permitted her. Her isolation and her age have heightened her sensuality and sexuality to an unbearable point. She masturbates regularly with an electric toothbrush (she is too embarrassed to buy a vibrator and, should someone stumble across her favoured tool, what could be more innocent and more easily explained away than a toothbrush?) and Belben describes in some detail the sensations and processes of this act. Prior to the use of the toothbrush she had been unable to orgasm, indeed for some time was unaware of what the sensation should be – she comments that literature failed her here as the female orgasm is either unspoken of or couched in such flowery romanticised language that it bears no relationship to the action sensations.
Some sections of the book shift to the perspective of Robin Hood (who is rather different to the man of myth and legend), complete with quotations from medieval poetry, which operates both as a metaphor for her Self and as, perhaps, a desperate attempt to both escape the isolation of her solitary consciousness, and provide a fantasy life.
She attempts to situate herself in nature, and with nature, to provide some relief, but death and abandonment follow her here too.
This book should not have fallen out of print, not least because it appears to have been well reviewed in the Guardian, FT and Telegraph, but such is the way of BURIAL. It is a very enjoyable, very interesting read, though not one for those of you who find graphic descriptions of sex and sex organs problematic.
This is my second of hers, and my next will be Is Beauty Good which was raved about by Michael Hamburger and Gabriel Josipovici, among others, which certainly bodes well.
Our narrator in this novel is a spinster (though only in her 30's – time has extended the cut-off date for this at least!) who has experienced much in her youth, has travelled and fucked and travelled and fucked and now suddenly finds herself " a shriveled person", she has "sucked herself dry", and she can no longer play those roles her youth and attractiveness permitted her. Her isolation and her age have heightened her sensuality and sexuality to an unbearable point. She masturbates regularly with an electric toothbrush (she is too embarrassed to buy a vibrator and, should someone stumble across her favoured tool, what could be more innocent and more easily explained away than a toothbrush?) and Belben describes in some detail the sensations and processes of this act. Prior to the use of the toothbrush she had been unable to orgasm, indeed for some time was unaware of what the sensation should be – she comments that literature failed her here as the female orgasm is either unspoken of or couched in such flowery romanticised language that it bears no relationship to the action sensations.
Some sections of the book shift to the perspective of Robin Hood (who is rather different to the man of myth and legend), complete with quotations from medieval poetry, which operates both as a metaphor for her Self and as, perhaps, a desperate attempt to both escape the isolation of her solitary consciousness, and provide a fantasy life.
She attempts to situate herself in nature, and with nature, to provide some relief, but death and abandonment follow her here too.
This book should not have fallen out of print, not least because it appears to have been well reviewed in the Guardian, FT and Telegraph, but such is the way of BURIAL. It is a very enjoyable, very interesting read, though not one for those of you who find graphic descriptions of sex and sex organs problematic.
This is my second of hers, and my next will be Is Beauty Good which was raved about by Michael Hamburger and Gabriel Josipovici, among others, which certainly bodes well.
August 8, 2025
In his introduction to this re-release of Rosalind Belben's Dreaming of Dead People, Gabriel Josipovici describes it as, in his mind, her finest book. Anyone who has read The Limit will know that Belben often writes about the physical needs, desires and sufferings of people and animals with a blunt frankness that can be difficult to read simply because she writes with a naked honesty that can be alarming. There is some of that here, but there is so much more, with experimental shifts in style and tone, and many vivid descriptive passages. Essentially this is an extended monologue by a woman who is coming to terms with her spinster's fate, but for all her admitted loneliness, she is a woman of passion, who has known lovers and sexual pleasure (not necessarily at the same time), and imagines fully the child she will never have. It is also a novel of childhood memories, rural life, the complications of the mother-daughter relationship, and the comfort of literary companions.
A longer review can be found here: https://roughghosts.com/2025/08/05/an...
A longer review can be found here: https://roughghosts.com/2025/08/05/an...
Want to read
September 23, 2014This is a very odd book and I've actually read it three times and am no clearer in my thoughts. Best to leave it for others to determine what is actually going on in this woman's mind. Rather bizarre and completely beyond me and I like metafiction/experimental fiction generally.
February 7, 2026
Longlisted for the 2025 Republic of Consciousness Prize, United States and Canada
Venice is not for me to describe. I cannot. But anyway, my attention is drawn off-centre, always to the decayed, the neglected, the perimeter of vision.
Dreaming of Dead People was originally published in 1979, but has been reissued in 2025 by And Other Stories (the pioneer of the small press subscription model in the UK), in collaboration with the author. The press plan to republish two more of her works.
The book was already on my radar to read after Melissa Harrison's eloquent review in The Guardian, so I was delighted to see it on the longlist US & Canada version of the Republic of Consciousness Prize.
This edition comes with an beautifully crafted introduction from Gabriel Josipovici. The author herself has explained, in this interview in Electric Literature that she hasn't re-read the work since 1989, although she is still eloquent on the form and structure of the novel:
As this suggests, the novel consists of six chapters. Our narrator Lavinia (Belben named her after the ill-fated character in Titus Andronicus) is 36 in the novel's 'now' although her thoughts roam into her past and her likely future, believing herself now to be permanently alone, and sometimes lonely (which she points out is far from the same thing).
The first piece 'At Torcello' describes an out-of-season winter visit to the almost deserted Venetian island, showcasing her prose, Josipovici describing her as a master of punctuation unmatched since Woolf (who is also referenced by Lavinia herself later in the novel):
It was a poor garden. I had never in my life seen such a miserable rat. Nothing was growing; nothing, I noticed with shock, had been planted; and the ground wasn’t fallow, it was waste, it was covered in rank grasses which after a small frost toppled and leant at angles to the sky; the fence was a fossil through which the rat crept. To the visitor, no one, it seemed, bothered to cultivate their fields and gardens. I was amazed at the lethargy, the despondency of the people. I raged. It was derelict, the island. It disturbed me.
The canal’s water was dull of eye, shifting in the wind.
The wind was cold; the air like a potato crisp hurt the gums if breathed the least gluttonously.
There was then a bridge, to fields on the other side of the canal; and two men talking; and two dogs. A spaniel bitch heavily in whelp.
I wish I didn’t understand the expressions of animals.
The second, 'The Act of Darkness', is more explicitly sexual, the 10-year celibate Lavinia finally achieving orgasm by means of an electric toothbrush, something she had failed to achieve when sexually active.
The centre pieces 'Cuckoo' and 'Owl' bring in medieval poetry and the legend of Robin Hood, a quote from which graces the distinctive And Other Stories style cover.
I can be Robin Hood, or his doppelgänger Hobbehode, at any mo-ment of the day: pausing, I raise my eyes, and am in the fourteenth century. It'ss a version of galloping horses along verges and beside railway trains. On my sixth birth-day, we had a fancy dress party: no marks for guessing who I was.
'The Search for Goodbye' begins 'If I had a daughter, I should call her Jessie', and imagines her daughter's upbringing, likely in the city, contrasting it to the narrator's own in rural Dorset (where Belbem herself was born, and now has returned, after 'a nomadic life').
The final title piece 'Dreaming of Dead People' is more oneiric and liminal, and contains the best self-description of Lavinia's imagined future, despite her relatively young age, as a 'spinster':
I should let things die: caring, and loving, and wanting. Life as I have known it is ending. I am drying up: the desire that has been pouring out of me all these years, wetting my knickers, is easing in its abundance. I am old, older, uglier, ugly. I have rings around my neck - hangman's wrinkles.
I have wrists with shackle marks. I have pouches under the eyes to fit two baby kangaroos.
I shall step defiantly on to false teeth, grey hair, reading glasses, vaginal atrophy, and varicose veins. To the limbo before the pitiful energy that arrives with the knowledge of things left undone which never are to be done.
I fear the unimaginable loneliness of the spinster, but the actuality, I think, will be numbed by dear nature.
A welcome re-issue and a great inclusion on the prize longlist.
And Other Stories
And Other Stories publishes mainly contemporary writing, including many translations. We select carefully and hope you will agree that the books are good, make you think and able to last the test of time. We aim to push people’s reading limits and help them discover authors of adventurous and inspiring writing. And we want to open up publishing so that from the outside it doesn’t look like some posh freemasonry. For example, as we said in this piece in The Guardian, we think more of the English publishing industry should move out of London, Oxford and their environs. In 2017 we moved our main office out of the South-East to Sheffield and found such a warm welcome.
And Other Stories is readers, editors, writers, translators and subscribers. While our books are distributed widely through bookshops, it’s our subscribers’ support that give us the confidence to publish what we do.
Venice is not for me to describe. I cannot. But anyway, my attention is drawn off-centre, always to the decayed, the neglected, the perimeter of vision.
Dreaming of Dead People was originally published in 1979, but has been reissued in 2025 by And Other Stories (the pioneer of the small press subscription model in the UK), in collaboration with the author. The press plan to republish two more of her works.
The book was already on my radar to read after Melissa Harrison's eloquent review in The Guardian, so I was delighted to see it on the longlist US & Canada version of the Republic of Consciousness Prize.
This edition comes with an beautifully crafted introduction from Gabriel Josipovici. The author herself has explained, in this interview in Electric Literature that she hasn't re-read the work since 1989, although she is still eloquent on the form and structure of the novel:
The chapters can’t have a linear progression from one to the other. They are ordered by subject-matter. It seems natural. I could say that we are in the ‘now’ of the narration from which time fans out. The main thing was to make sure the text was allocated to the right chapter, and that each chapter kept to its individual topic. There is a hidden structure whereby the chapters ‘Cuckoo’ and ‘Owl’ form a centre plank whilst two chapters at each end make the trestles.
As this suggests, the novel consists of six chapters. Our narrator Lavinia (Belben named her after the ill-fated character in Titus Andronicus) is 36 in the novel's 'now' although her thoughts roam into her past and her likely future, believing herself now to be permanently alone, and sometimes lonely (which she points out is far from the same thing).
The first piece 'At Torcello' describes an out-of-season winter visit to the almost deserted Venetian island, showcasing her prose, Josipovici describing her as a master of punctuation unmatched since Woolf (who is also referenced by Lavinia herself later in the novel):
It was a poor garden. I had never in my life seen such a miserable rat. Nothing was growing; nothing, I noticed with shock, had been planted; and the ground wasn’t fallow, it was waste, it was covered in rank grasses which after a small frost toppled and leant at angles to the sky; the fence was a fossil through which the rat crept. To the visitor, no one, it seemed, bothered to cultivate their fields and gardens. I was amazed at the lethargy, the despondency of the people. I raged. It was derelict, the island. It disturbed me.
The canal’s water was dull of eye, shifting in the wind.
The wind was cold; the air like a potato crisp hurt the gums if breathed the least gluttonously.
There was then a bridge, to fields on the other side of the canal; and two men talking; and two dogs. A spaniel bitch heavily in whelp.
I wish I didn’t understand the expressions of animals.
The second, 'The Act of Darkness', is more explicitly sexual, the 10-year celibate Lavinia finally achieving orgasm by means of an electric toothbrush, something she had failed to achieve when sexually active.
The centre pieces 'Cuckoo' and 'Owl' bring in medieval poetry and the legend of Robin Hood, a quote from which graces the distinctive And Other Stories style cover.
I can be Robin Hood, or his doppelgänger Hobbehode, at any mo-ment of the day: pausing, I raise my eyes, and am in the fourteenth century. It'ss a version of galloping horses along verges and beside railway trains. On my sixth birth-day, we had a fancy dress party: no marks for guessing who I was.
'The Search for Goodbye' begins 'If I had a daughter, I should call her Jessie', and imagines her daughter's upbringing, likely in the city, contrasting it to the narrator's own in rural Dorset (where Belbem herself was born, and now has returned, after 'a nomadic life').
The final title piece 'Dreaming of Dead People' is more oneiric and liminal, and contains the best self-description of Lavinia's imagined future, despite her relatively young age, as a 'spinster':
I should let things die: caring, and loving, and wanting. Life as I have known it is ending. I am drying up: the desire that has been pouring out of me all these years, wetting my knickers, is easing in its abundance. I am old, older, uglier, ugly. I have rings around my neck - hangman's wrinkles.
I have wrists with shackle marks. I have pouches under the eyes to fit two baby kangaroos.
I shall step defiantly on to false teeth, grey hair, reading glasses, vaginal atrophy, and varicose veins. To the limbo before the pitiful energy that arrives with the knowledge of things left undone which never are to be done.
I fear the unimaginable loneliness of the spinster, but the actuality, I think, will be numbed by dear nature.
A welcome re-issue and a great inclusion on the prize longlist.
And Other Stories
And Other Stories publishes mainly contemporary writing, including many translations. We select carefully and hope you will agree that the books are good, make you think and able to last the test of time. We aim to push people’s reading limits and help them discover authors of adventurous and inspiring writing. And we want to open up publishing so that from the outside it doesn’t look like some posh freemasonry. For example, as we said in this piece in The Guardian, we think more of the English publishing industry should move out of London, Oxford and their environs. In 2017 we moved our main office out of the South-East to Sheffield and found such a warm welcome.
And Other Stories is readers, editors, writers, translators and subscribers. While our books are distributed widely through bookshops, it’s our subscribers’ support that give us the confidence to publish what we do.
Read
November 13, 2025like geoguesser but instead of a map you are dropped inside of a brain and you have no idea who or what or where you are. the brain is thinking of the soul as a grey ball of cloud that rolls forwards like pumpkin, and behind the thought you can see the shape of a park or a supermarket, but you cannot be sure. really gorgeous! sexy in a bramble and thickets way.
July 11, 2016
Senryu Review:
Disturbing novel
with a schizophrenic bent:
loneliness in love.
Disturbing novel
with a schizophrenic bent:
loneliness in love.
October 31, 2025
Really enjoyed this one about a lady who learns to masturbate using a toothbrush
January 22, 2026
This book is on the 2026 long list of the Republic of Consciousness prize for the US and Canada. The prize is for literature by small presses and usually is made up of "explorative" content that larger well know presses wouldn't take a chance on.
The narrator and main character is a 36 year old woman looking back at her life. She has never been married and seems obsessed with a woman's experience with sex in a very close and intimate way. There is a famous scene involving an electric toothbrush that seems to be the most written about part of the book in critical reviews.
It is divided into several different sections involving her sexual thoughts, a dreamed up Robin Hood segment and much interaction with some gruesome animal treatment. I am sure that with enough rereading and research i could understand how these sections fit together, but I will leave that up to other readers as I go on to the other 9 books on this prize list, hopefully finding some to be more transparent and clear as to form and meaning for a first time reader!
The narrator and main character is a 36 year old woman looking back at her life. She has never been married and seems obsessed with a woman's experience with sex in a very close and intimate way. There is a famous scene involving an electric toothbrush that seems to be the most written about part of the book in critical reviews.
It is divided into several different sections involving her sexual thoughts, a dreamed up Robin Hood segment and much interaction with some gruesome animal treatment. I am sure that with enough rereading and research i could understand how these sections fit together, but I will leave that up to other readers as I go on to the other 9 books on this prize list, hopefully finding some to be more transparent and clear as to form and meaning for a first time reader!
February 4, 2026
Told across six chapters. Our lead has reached the middle of life and is having a bit of a reflection and or crisis. She's 36, mind you.
This culmination of travel and seeing places, having a sex life that alters and changes, Robin Hood (Yes!), a family dog, an imagined child, and the closing of letting a loved one go through dreams. Hence the title.
It's beautiful at times. The imagery is stunning. A touch of humor. And a bit of pearls clutched at times.
Ideally focusing on that question, "Well, what now?!
This culmination of travel and seeing places, having a sex life that alters and changes, Robin Hood (Yes!), a family dog, an imagined child, and the closing of letting a loved one go through dreams. Hence the title.
It's beautiful at times. The imagery is stunning. A touch of humor. And a bit of pearls clutched at times.
Ideally focusing on that question, "Well, what now?!
August 20, 2025
“The Act of Darkness” and “At Torcello” are masterpieces!!!!!!!!
I did like some parts better than others but I adored this overall. Such a unique female voice. Explorations of desire, loneliness, family, nature, solitude, masturbation. What more could you want!!! x
I did like some parts better than others but I adored this overall. Such a unique female voice. Explorations of desire, loneliness, family, nature, solitude, masturbation. What more could you want!!! x
October 10, 2025
will never look at electric toothbrush the same :D also I am not sure why people are saying they're confused by this book..it's about a lady who wants to fuck.
February 5, 2026
Dreaming of Dead People
Rosalind Belben
Well. I fell a little in love with this.
Rosalind Belben: a master of Invisible spidery threads of her own intuitions, the sort with which she holds inside jokes within only herself, yet delineates for a discerning, seeking reader to trace with their fingers as far as they can until it’s lost.
In “Dreaming of Dead People,” you’re tracing the life and thoughts of Lavinia, a woman who is coming to terms with spinsterhood and the steady drum of age toward death by way of a sort of internal monologue.
She’s drumming up fantasies, she’s recounting lost loves of many species, she’s offering a central theme of Robin Hood and his exploits, all with clever little nods and jokes along the way, and, not to mention some of the most stunning nature writing I’ve encountered, ever.
Lavinia is every bit of herself—she’s lonely but content in it, a strange twist of yearning and satisfaction with staying put I think many readers relate to.
This is challenging reading. To reiterate a metaphor from above: I felt like I was reading a spiderweb, and not just on one day and night either—rather, across all its stages of being built, repair, reiterations, and its fading in storm and wind. There’s something delicate connecting the visceral, bloody death of wrapped up, punctured insects. An intricacy linking the gore.
“I don’t have to define anything: I can put my hand out and touch. I am peeling off a transfer of myself. I am saying: here is a life, what do you make of it. And trying not to mind that you turn aside. I am, she would say, I should say, am saying, genuinely alive.”
I thought about the solitude in On the Calculation of Volume. I was reminded of Charlotte Wood and Renata Adler. The back of the my copy suggests Proust. Whatever: it’s Rosalind Belben. And I loved it.
See comments for some content cautions.
Rosalind Belben
Well. I fell a little in love with this.
Rosalind Belben: a master of Invisible spidery threads of her own intuitions, the sort with which she holds inside jokes within only herself, yet delineates for a discerning, seeking reader to trace with their fingers as far as they can until it’s lost.
In “Dreaming of Dead People,” you’re tracing the life and thoughts of Lavinia, a woman who is coming to terms with spinsterhood and the steady drum of age toward death by way of a sort of internal monologue.
She’s drumming up fantasies, she’s recounting lost loves of many species, she’s offering a central theme of Robin Hood and his exploits, all with clever little nods and jokes along the way, and, not to mention some of the most stunning nature writing I’ve encountered, ever.
Lavinia is every bit of herself—she’s lonely but content in it, a strange twist of yearning and satisfaction with staying put I think many readers relate to.
This is challenging reading. To reiterate a metaphor from above: I felt like I was reading a spiderweb, and not just on one day and night either—rather, across all its stages of being built, repair, reiterations, and its fading in storm and wind. There’s something delicate connecting the visceral, bloody death of wrapped up, punctured insects. An intricacy linking the gore.
“I don’t have to define anything: I can put my hand out and touch. I am peeling off a transfer of myself. I am saying: here is a life, what do you make of it. And trying not to mind that you turn aside. I am, she would say, I should say, am saying, genuinely alive.”
I thought about the solitude in On the Calculation of Volume. I was reminded of Charlotte Wood and Renata Adler. The back of the my copy suggests Proust. Whatever: it’s Rosalind Belben. And I loved it.
See comments for some content cautions.
Read
February 7, 2026Longlisted for the 2026 RofC US/Canada Prize
*
The mosaic, in the basilica, and the plaster, is half missing. The more moving. She seemed very high, very slender. I could lick the tear from her cheek and taste the salt. (15)
started out really loving this book… agreeing with the introduction’s writer, that she uses punctuation as amazingly as Woolf, but then… & it wasn’t the electric toothbrush that others mention!!!! (ha!) but the violence towards animals… &, this warning / reaction is coming from someone that has read the entire Cormac McCarthy catalog (including the violent plays & short stories, one published in a lit journal before any books & still haunts me so much with a scene including animals), so… take that for what it’s worth.
made it thru, skimming a bit as needed, so just FYI…
still really strong so not listed last (Unfinished Acts is well-written but not as innovative or interesting to me, but mainly only because I’m not a fan of that type of book either.
Personal In-Progress Rankings…
—On Earth As It Is Beneath, Ana Paula Maia (tr. Padma Viswanathan)
—Hothouse Bloom, Austyn Wohlers
—Iris & the Dead, Miranda Schreiber
—Small Scale Sinners, Mahreen Sohail
—Dreaming of Dead People, Rosalind Belben
—Unfinished Acts of Wild Creation, Sarah Yahm
[currently reading: Little World, Josephine Rowe & up next: The Endless Week, Laura Vázquez (tr. Alex Niemi)]
*
The mosaic, in the basilica, and the plaster, is half missing. The more moving. She seemed very high, very slender. I could lick the tear from her cheek and taste the salt. (15)
started out really loving this book… agreeing with the introduction’s writer, that she uses punctuation as amazingly as Woolf, but then… & it wasn’t the electric toothbrush that others mention!!!! (ha!) but the violence towards animals… &, this warning / reaction is coming from someone that has read the entire Cormac McCarthy catalog (including the violent plays & short stories, one published in a lit journal before any books & still haunts me so much with a scene including animals), so… take that for what it’s worth.
made it thru, skimming a bit as needed, so just FYI…
still really strong so not listed last (Unfinished Acts is well-written but not as innovative or interesting to me, but mainly only because I’m not a fan of that type of book either.
Personal In-Progress Rankings…
—On Earth As It Is Beneath, Ana Paula Maia (tr. Padma Viswanathan)
—Hothouse Bloom, Austyn Wohlers
—Iris & the Dead, Miranda Schreiber
—Small Scale Sinners, Mahreen Sohail
—Dreaming of Dead People, Rosalind Belben
—Unfinished Acts of Wild Creation, Sarah Yahm
[currently reading: Little World, Josephine Rowe & up next: The Endless Week, Laura Vázquez (tr. Alex Niemi)]
August 27, 2025
4.5 actually
October 10, 2025
up my alley but i could definitely see people not being a huge fan
July 8, 2025
Read as part of the And Other Stories reprint, and I was absolutely blown away. I will be tracking down more from Belben off the back of this.
November 16, 2025
I wanted to like this so much more than I did. I bought it back in England, back when I had endless options for reading material, and carried it far over the snowy hills of Mongolia, all on the strength of a Guardian review which described Belben as a Virginia Woolf for the second half of the twentieth century, and this book as an agonised Modernist tract on celibacy and sexuality, mixed in with a medieval erotic fantasia about Robin Hood laced with the bawdy world of the Middle English ballads. Well, that sounds exactly like Michael Allan's thing. Sadly, I found Dreaming of Dead People to resemble more closely the self indulgent autofiction of the rah-girl Substack author (the poshest person I ever met at Cambridge told me she was going to be the next Annie Ernaux, and in a way she could not know I felt she was speaking generationally there) than what I expected in a mix-mash of Woolf and Chaucer.
Parts of this book, essentially a wounded run-on narration by a childless woman confused and pained by the onset of 'spinsterhood', are rendered with such honesty and acute precision of feeling that I was riveted and struck by own suffocated feelings spoken back to me. I was especially moved by the early admission - 'Don't think I don't mind. I do mind.' - that recurs throughout as a motif. There's something so very liberatory about an obstinate refusal to 'grin and bear it', to 'get on', to refuse to conceal your hurt - and that confession, that you DO mind about all the pain you've endured, is a great vital one for honesty about the intention behind writing, because why else would you write if not because 'you mind'? In my experience, suffering is certainly furthered by the feeling that you must suffocate - or sublimate - your suffering for the sake of someone else; someone who does not really care, or could not know, or is not there, or will not stay.
In today's climate of maximised confusion between the sexes, it is rewarding to read an author say that they DO mind about their romantic failures, they DO mind about their lack of sexual fulfilment, they DO mind about the prospect of a lonely middle and old age stretching out before them, and they DO mind about feeling excluded from the rest of humanity, the couples becoming threes and fours and families of more as they seem to saunter down the road of biological destiny, and you remain One, the forgotten One.
All of this is powerful and worthwhile. Unfortunately that 'precision of feeling', at least on first read, seems to dissipate into vague and unfocused drifts as the chapters move on. This is the problem of inner monologue when unmoored from a character rooted in relationships and place; without that element of abstraction, that separation, I feel I am only being told about lots of different things - the countryside, horses and dogs - that I do not necessarily care about, by someone I do not feel I really know. Yes, you have opinions - but who are you, and why should I care? I never feel this way with Woolf, even at her most obscure, because her observations are coming from a place of character; even when you're unsure of the identity of the speaker, you are hearing a view from SOMEWHERE, and this is interesting because the absorption and owning of the world by a personality is interesting, whereas Belben's lengthy discussions of her dogs are just talk of some rural bitch I do not know. Likewise, although for me the Robin Hood chapters were probably the text's highlight in terms of prose, there was such a disappointing lack of commitment there. She does not give herself over to the language and sound of the Middle English ballad, as Joyce would have - she signals that Medieval Man had a different sensual world, but she hardly tries to give this to us in language. Instead, we hear about the books that the narrator/Belben liked as a child, and how they might have shaped her solitary character.
I think I'm particularly disappointed by my dislike of this one because the republishing was billed, as they often are, as a rediscovery of an unjustly neglected author, and naturally you want to cheer on the continued distribution of the body of work of a writer who has only ever achieved marginal acclaim (especially as an unpublished writer nearing the completion of a manuscript that I suspect will be my last...) I do hope Belben is rediscovered, because I want to snatch all things from the fire, and save everything, even though I know that nothing can be saved. I am probably missing something, and that is my failure.
Parts of this book, essentially a wounded run-on narration by a childless woman confused and pained by the onset of 'spinsterhood', are rendered with such honesty and acute precision of feeling that I was riveted and struck by own suffocated feelings spoken back to me. I was especially moved by the early admission - 'Don't think I don't mind. I do mind.' - that recurs throughout as a motif. There's something so very liberatory about an obstinate refusal to 'grin and bear it', to 'get on', to refuse to conceal your hurt - and that confession, that you DO mind about all the pain you've endured, is a great vital one for honesty about the intention behind writing, because why else would you write if not because 'you mind'? In my experience, suffering is certainly furthered by the feeling that you must suffocate - or sublimate - your suffering for the sake of someone else; someone who does not really care, or could not know, or is not there, or will not stay.
In today's climate of maximised confusion between the sexes, it is rewarding to read an author say that they DO mind about their romantic failures, they DO mind about their lack of sexual fulfilment, they DO mind about the prospect of a lonely middle and old age stretching out before them, and they DO mind about feeling excluded from the rest of humanity, the couples becoming threes and fours and families of more as they seem to saunter down the road of biological destiny, and you remain One, the forgotten One.
All of this is powerful and worthwhile. Unfortunately that 'precision of feeling', at least on first read, seems to dissipate into vague and unfocused drifts as the chapters move on. This is the problem of inner monologue when unmoored from a character rooted in relationships and place; without that element of abstraction, that separation, I feel I am only being told about lots of different things - the countryside, horses and dogs - that I do not necessarily care about, by someone I do not feel I really know. Yes, you have opinions - but who are you, and why should I care? I never feel this way with Woolf, even at her most obscure, because her observations are coming from a place of character; even when you're unsure of the identity of the speaker, you are hearing a view from SOMEWHERE, and this is interesting because the absorption and owning of the world by a personality is interesting, whereas Belben's lengthy discussions of her dogs are just talk of some rural bitch I do not know. Likewise, although for me the Robin Hood chapters were probably the text's highlight in terms of prose, there was such a disappointing lack of commitment there. She does not give herself over to the language and sound of the Middle English ballad, as Joyce would have - she signals that Medieval Man had a different sensual world, but she hardly tries to give this to us in language. Instead, we hear about the books that the narrator/Belben liked as a child, and how they might have shaped her solitary character.
I think I'm particularly disappointed by my dislike of this one because the republishing was billed, as they often are, as a rediscovery of an unjustly neglected author, and naturally you want to cheer on the continued distribution of the body of work of a writer who has only ever achieved marginal acclaim (especially as an unpublished writer nearing the completion of a manuscript that I suspect will be my last...) I do hope Belben is rediscovered, because I want to snatch all things from the fire, and save everything, even though I know that nothing can be saved. I am probably missing something, and that is my failure.
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February 8, 20262026 RofC US/Canada Prize Longlist #2
A very cunty book, which took me by surprise. Not an unwelcome surprise, but it was still a jarring gear switch from the first chapter. What was very unwelcome, however, was the chapter on the dog. It wasn't only the story about the dog that got to me, but what was written about other animals. I can really do without graphic depictions of domestic animals suffering, thank you very much - especially since I’m not sure what the purpose was. With all that said, I’m still thinking about it and trying to tie everything together. It’s intriguing, I’ll give it that.
A very cunty book, which took me by surprise. Not an unwelcome surprise, but it was still a jarring gear switch from the first chapter. What was very unwelcome, however, was the chapter on the dog. It wasn't only the story about the dog that got to me, but what was written about other animals. I can really do without graphic depictions of domestic animals suffering, thank you very much - especially since I’m not sure what the purpose was. With all that said, I’m still thinking about it and trying to tie everything together. It’s intriguing, I’ll give it that.
February 9, 2021
Unfortunately full book about a woman reflecting on her life and coming to terms with loneliness. I guess she was slowly going mad but I couldn’t really tell as I started skimming some chapters because of the tedium. The only fun/interesting chapter was the orgasm chapter where she explores why she’d never had one with any of her lovers and begins to experiment with her electric toothbrush. The rest was fairly boring.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
September 29, 2025
I found this dull and too self-indulgent. Not my cup of tea at all; its vague, not quite stream of consciousness style just grew tiresome, and it felt like I was reading in circles leading to nowhere, not even into the depths of a character’s inner world. Quite disappointing.
December 21, 2025
Om ensamhetens villkor, inifrån ensamhetens vansinne, på, ibland, fantastisk prosa +robin hood. Bättre, och märkligare, än Aliocha Choll, som ändå skrev om ungefär samma sak, och borde därför få mer, inte mindre uppmärksamhet.
September 3, 2023
smá boring, en held að ég sé bara ekki spennt fyrir contextinu í bókinni
October 6, 2025
Got out of my bath to review this. I am floored
October 7, 2025
Obsessed, so beautiful and raw and funny and sad
December 6, 2025
review coming soon!
December 11, 2025
This book is nuts, in a good way
December 13, 2025
I hated literally everything about this book
January 30, 2026
3.5*/5
January 31, 2026
One of the most beautiful, honest, lyrically poetic books I have ever read.
July 20, 2025
despite lovely, lovely prose, the book itself was so erratic - with a self-important, mildly unlikable protagonist such that I stopped caring.
lots of death, pain, and uncomfortably described sex. many mentions of cockles and winkles.
lots of death, pain, and uncomfortably described sex. many mentions of cockles and winkles.
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