Janet Frame

Janet Frame (born August 28, 1924, Dunedin, New Zealand—died January 29, 2004, Dunedin) was a leading New Zealand writer of novels, short fiction, and poetry. Her works were noted for their explorations of alienation and isolation.

Frame was born to a railroad worker and a sometime-poet who had been a maid for the family of writer Katherine Mansfield. Her early years were marked by poverty, the drowning death of her sister, and the disruptions created by her brother’s epilepsy. In 1945, while studying to be a teacher, she suffered a breakdown. Misdiagnosed as having schizophrenia, she spent nearly a decade in psychiatric hospitals. From 1947, following the drowning death of another sister, she endured repeated courses of electroconvulsive therapy. During that time she read the classics voraciously and cultivated her writing talent.

In 1951, while still a patient, Frame’s first book, The Lagoon, was published. A collection of short stories, it expresses the sense of isolation and insecurity of those who feel they do not fit into a normal world. She was scheduled to have a lobotomy until hospital officials learned that she had won a literary award for The Lagoon. The procedure was canceled, and Frame was released in 1955.

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Writer and literary arbiter Frank Sargeson offered her the use of a shack on his property in Takapuna, and there, under his mentorship, she composed her first novel, Owls Do Cry (1957). The experimental book incorporates both poetry and prose and lacks a conventional plot. It investigates the worth of the individual and the ambiguous border between sanity and madness. Faces in the Water (1961) is a fictionalized account of her time in New Zealand mental institutions. It was written as a therapy exercise while she received psychiatric care in London, where she lived and wrote from 1956 to 1963. In all her novels, Frame depicted a society deprived of wholeness by its refusal to come to terms with disorder, irrationality, and madness. Her sophisticated and original use of frame stories to convey the subjectivity of experience and the existence of individually distinct realities was much remarked upon.

The Edge of the Alphabet (1962) centres on the struggles of several dislocated people and their largely futile efforts to connect with society. In Scented Gardens for the Blind (1963), a girl becomes mute after her parents’ marriage dissolves. The Adaptable Man (1965) is a subversive comedy set in a small town that has just been connected to the electrical grid. Frame further investigated sanity and social isolation in A State of Siege (1966; film 1978), about an elderly unmarried woman who attempts to start a new life, and The Rainbirds (1968; also published as Yellow Flowers in the Antipodean Room), about a man resurrected from the dead. Intensive Care (1970) combines a story of thwarted love with a dystopian tale of a society that eliminates its weakest members. Her later novels include Daughter Buffalo (1972), an intricately structured work fixated on death; Living in the Maniototo (1979), a surreal exploration of the mind of a woman who appears to have several identities; and The Carpathians (1988), an allegory-laden investigation of language and memory. The latter work earned her the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (later called the Commonwealth Book Prize) in 1989.

Towards Another Summer, an autobiographical novel Frame wrote in 1963 but deemed too personal for publication until after her death, was released in 2007. The highly private Frame legally changed her last name to Clutha in 1973 to make herself more difficult to locate. In the Memorial Room (2013)—written in 1974 and also, because of its autobiographical elements, purposely withheld from publication until after Frame’s death—was a roman à clef about her time in France.

Other volumes of short fiction are Snowman, Snowman: Fables and Fantasies (1963), The Reservoir: Stories and Sketches (1963), and You Are Now Entering the Human Heart (1983). Her poetry was collected in The Pocket Mirror (1967) and The Goose Bath (2006).

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Frame wrote three volumes of memoirs: To the Is-Land (1982), An Angel at My Table (1984), and The Envoy from Mirror City (1985). Those autobiographical works were adapted for a critically acclaimed film, An Angel at My Table (1990), directed by Jane Campion. Frame received numerous honours. In 1983 she was made Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE), and in 1990 she received the Order of New Zealand. In 2003 she received one of the inaugural Prime Minister’s Awards for Literary Achievement, along with poet Hone Tuwhare and historian Michael King.