Excerpt from In the Memorial Room by Janet Frame, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

I said I admired some of her poems very much, particularly those of the last book, Rehearsals.

Two ladies at the presentation (there seemed to be mostly ladies and very very tall men, almost with their heads near the roof, in the small group surrounding me), Connie Watercress and Grace Armstrong, the two principal donors of the Fellowship, replied that Rose Hurndell's first two books were their favourites, the ones written in New Zealand: The Harbour, and Manuka Night.

—Her poems have been translated into thirteen languages, Connie said. —And her Letter to Procne is now known all over the world. Just think!

I thought – just. There is such intense interest in Rose Hurndell's works, more so, naturally, now that she is dead, and her last poems have been compared in their purity and otherworldliness, their vision of death, to the Requiem music which Mozart left unfinished, and although they were written before her death they have the effect of being posthumous, of actually being written after death.

The conversation that evening was mostly about Margaret Rose Hurndell and her life and her family. I was told that her sister and her sister's husband had retired to live in Menton two years ago, and that two friends she had made when she lived in London came each year to spend the winter in Menton and to make a pilgrimage to the Villa Florita. Her work was known in the city. The city was proud that she had lived and died there – yes, they were even proud of her death there, although her body was taken to London to be buried.

Towards the close of that presentation evening, when suddenly the talk of Margaret Rose Hurndell had died away, someone asked me – I think it was Connie Watercress – what I planned to write in Menton. I said vaguely that I did not quite know.

—I'm afraid I haven't read your last book, Connie said. —But I've heard so much about it! The New Family. I smiled and murmured, —Yes, New Families.

—There's a shortage of historical novelists in New Zealand, someone said, as if talking of petrol or transistor batteries or vacuum cleaners.

—So we're proud to have you.

—Will you be writing something historical, something French?

—Do you speak French?

—Did you know that Peter Cartwright, who's at Oxford now, thinks you are the finest historical novelist we've had? I haven't read your Wairau Days myself but he said it can't be faulted. I read an article about it in one of the English papers. I get the Times and Guardian flown over.

—The paper's too thin, airmail, don't you find? It tears.

—We're proud to have you. Perhaps there'll be more financial support for the Fellowship when they know you've got it. We have to advertise you a little, you know.

—He's blushing.

—So he is!

—Well, Harry, we'll soon get rid of those blushes.

—Your father's a doctor, I hear?

•

And so the conversation continued until one by one the guests found their fur coats and went home, and I stayed a while by myself in the smoke-laden air, snaffling the last few savouries, for I was hungry, and a little drunk, and I went back to the hotel room where they'd booked me (I'd refused to stay with any members of the Committee who'd invited me) and I went straight to bed and fell asleep.

And I dreamed.

• I dreamed.

I have definite views about a novelist's inclusion of dreams in his work. Dreams, I think, are for the first novel where all the material for the future is accumulated, packed tightly as in a storehouse the walls of which are strained to bursting point with their contents. Dreams may be inserted as extra provisions because the storehouse has no further room for solid material; dreams weigh nothing, do not need equipment for their transport and may have a chemical volatility which enables them to be replaced and changed often or annihilated when they are no longer of use. I maintain, however, they are one of the privileged tricks allowable only to the first novel, and, later, when the solid material has been withdrawn and used and the mind itself with the approach of middle and old age and death (not necessarily in that order) begins the process of confirming its doubt of the substantiality of the apparently 'real' world, as a preparation for its own final material dissolution, then dreams may re-enter the novelist's work: he may use them as he will.

Excerpted from In the Memorial Room by Janet Frame. Copyright © 2013 by Janet Frame. Excerpted by permission of Counterpoint Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.