Dreaming of Dead People

by Rosalind Belben

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.

Genres: Fiction, Novels, British Literature, 20th Century

190 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1979

About the author

Rosalind 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.

Reviews

[Jonathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Joseph Schreiber · Rating 5 out of 5]

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...

[Lynne King]

This 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.

[Martha]

like 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.

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

Senryu Review:

Disturbing novel
with a schizophrenic bent:
loneliness in love.

[Joséphine Brissy-Hayes · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really enjoyed this one about a lady who learns to masturbate using a toothbrush

[Leah · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[McKenna · Rating 4 out of 5]

“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

[Nata · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 actually

[Jane · Rating 5 out of 5]

up my alley but i could definitely see people not being a huge fan

[Ben Dutton · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Michael · Rating 2 out of 5]

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.

[Bob Lopez · Rating 2 out of 5]

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.

[Matthew · Rating 1 out of 5]

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.

[Roland Hassel · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Sigga · Rating 3 out of 5]

smá boring, en held að ég sé bara ekki spennt fyrir contextinu í bókinni

[Esteban Sanchez · Rating 5 out of 5]

Got out of my bath to review this. I am floored

[Noémie Farcy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Obsessed, so beautiful and raw and funny and sad

[cora:) · Rating 4 out of 5]

review coming soon!

[Nuka Gambashidze · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is nuts, in a good way

[Cassandra · Rating 1 out of 5]

I hated literally everything about this book

[Lewis Boyd · Rating 2 out of 5]

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.

[Carrie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Probably a solid 3.5. I like the boldness of the character and the themes Belben pretty fearlessly explores, though I was a little bored by the Robin Hood bits, and it sometimes left me cold.

[Kay Baird]

Margaret Reynolds included a long excerpt from this in her collection Erotica; Women's Writing from Sappho to Margaret Atwood; it moved me to read the rest.

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of these short stories changed my life, the others were there.