Dreaming of Dead People by Rosalind Belben review – rivals anything by Virginia Woolf

More than 40 years on from its first publication, this exploration of one woman’s thoughts and fantasies is a gem worthy of rediscovery

There’s no getting around it: Dreaming of Dead People is an extremely strange book. Born in 1941, Rosalind Belben was first published in the 1970s; this, her fourth novel, first came out in 1979. Her eighth and most recent, Our Horses in Egypt, won the James Tait Black award in 2007.

Dreaming of Dead People might best be described as an early example of autofiction: its narrator, Lavinia, is& the same age as Belben was at the time& of writing, and she recalls a& similar childhood in Dorset, including a father who was a Royal Navy commander and who was killed when she was three. Belben has described the book as “a study of the human figure”, and given its parallels with her own life story and its raw and deeply personal style any reader could be forgiven for assuming that the figure is& her own.