Janet frame wikipedia
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Janet Frame
New Zealand author (1924–2004)
Janet Paterson FrameONZ CBE (28 August 1924 – 29 January 2004) was a New Zealand author. She is internationally renowned for her work, which includes novels, short stories, poetry, juvenile fiction, and an autobiography, and received numerous awards including being appointed to the Order of New Zealand,[1] New Zealand's highest civil honour.[2][3]
Frame's celebrity derived from her dramatic personal history as well as her literary career. Following years of psychiatric hospitalisation, Frame was scheduled for a lobotomy that was cancelled when, just days before the procedure, her debut publication of short stories was unexpectedly awarded a national literary prize.[4] Many of her novels and short stories explore her childhood and psychiatric hospitalisation from a fictional perspective, and her award-winning three-volume autobiography was adapted into the film An Angel at My Table (1990), directed by Jane Campion.[2][3]
Biography
Early years: 1924–1956
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Janet Frame ONZ CBE
Janet Frame was born in Dunedin. Her talent for writing emerged at a young age, with frequent publication of her poems in children's pages and on radio. She attended the University of Otago and trained as a teacher, but shortly after she abandoned the classroom in favour of writing. Around this time, she was misdiagnosed with schizophrenia. Her first collection of short stories, The Lagoon, winning the Hubert Church Memorial Award, was written in 1946 but not published until 1952. Many of the stories in that volume are told from the point of view of children whose imaginative worlds are dismissed by socially conformist adults.
After having spent nearly a decade in and out of mental hospitals, in 1955 Frame accepted an invitation from Frank Sargeson to live in an old army hut in the garden of his Takapuna home. With his encouragement she wrote her first novel, Owls Do Cry (1957) and her literary career was launched. She travelled to Europe, and after examination by medical experts in London, her psychiatric diagnosis was overturned.
Her publishing caree
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Tom Shakespeare
The Lagoon, Janet Frame’s first volume of short stories, sat on my shelf for years. Only when I visited Dunedin, her home town, did I discover that it was that book, or rather the prize awarded to it, which saved the author from a lobotomy.
On my last flight back to Europe from New Zealand, I read To the Is-Land, Frame’s account of her upbringing in rural Otago, memorably filmed by Jane Campion in An Angel At My Table. Her father worked on the railway, while her mother was of the Christadelphian faith. There were many children, and the family was poor: the book is full of vivid descriptions of rural escapades, school traumas and family mishaps. It also describes Janet’s emerging literary talent, first expressed via poems in the local paper – she was also very good at maths.
Janet Frame also describes the traumas of her youth: her brother developing epilepsy, and her sister Myrtle drowning in the local swimming pool. Later her sister Isabel was also to drown. Ironically, the young Janet herself longed to be disabled: “I perceived that in a wor
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