Janet Frame (1924-2004) Australian Literature

Janet Frame (1924-2004)

Australian Literature

Frame, Janet (1924-2004), New Zealand novelist and short-story writer. Extremely lonely through her time at the University of Otago teacher-training college, Frame attempted suicide when she was faced with the prospect of a lifetime teaching, and was committed to a mental institution. Misdiagnosed as a schizophrenic, she was caught up in a cycle of dehumanizing treatments. In hospital, she read the classics voraciously and started to write. She only avoided serious psychosurgery because her first collection of stories, The Lagoon: Stories (1951), won the Hubert Church prose award. Frank Sargeson, himself an influential author in New Zealand, let Frame stay in his shed to complete her first novel, Owls Do Cry (1957). This novel explores the themes of the worth of an individual and the ambiguous border between sanity and madness. Frame sees a society that is unable to cope with disorder, irrationality, and madness as incomplete and inadequate. She has now written 11 novels, including Faces in the Water (1961), The Rainbirds (1968), Living in the Maniototo (1979), and The Carpathians, which won the Commonwealth Writers Prize in 1989; four collections of short stories and sketches, a volume of poetry, The Pocket Mirror (1967), and a children's book, Mona Minim and the Smell of the Sun (1969). However it was the publication of Frame's three-volume Autobiography (1989), comprising To the Is-land (1982; James Wattie Book of the Year Award, 1983), An Angel at My Table (1984; New Zealand Literature Award for Non-Fiction, 1984), and The Envoy from Mirror City (1985), and its subsequent translation into an award-winning film (An Angel at My Table, 1990; adapted by Laura Jones, and directed by Jane Campion), that brought her writing a popular audience to match her critical reputation. Frame's novels combine brutal self-honesty with literary experimentation, using interior monologue and elaborately developed symbolism to parallel her personal experience of insecurity with the isolation of those who feel they have no place in the “normal” world. In 1983, Janet Frame was awarded the CBE.