Search - List of Books by Janet Frame
"Electricity, the peril the wind sings to in the wires on a gray day." -- Janet Frame
Janet Paterson Frame, ONZ, CBE (28 August 1924 - 29 January 2004) was a New Zealand author. She wrote eleven novels, four collections of short stories, a book of poetry, an edition of juvenile fiction, and three volumes of autobiography during her lifetime. Since her death, a twelfth novel, a second volume of poetry, and a handful of short stories have been released. Frame was known for her dramatic personal history as well as her writing. She was scheduled for a lobotomy that was cancelled when her first book was awarded a national literary prize. Some of these experiences featured in her work, such as her autobiographical trilogy, and also in director Jane Campion's popular film adaptation of the texts. Frame was described by scholar Simone Oettli as a writer who simulaneously sought fame and anonymity, Frame eschewed the dominant New Zealand literary realism of the post-war era, combining prose, poetry, and modernist elements with a magical realist style, winning many literary prizes despite mixed critical and public reception.
"Divisions of the kind were fashionable at that time, and it was so easy to stifle one's need to help by deciding that help could neither be accepted nor understood.""For your own good is a persuasive argument that will eventually make a man agree to his own destruction.""From the first place of liquid darkness, within the second place of air and light, I set down the following record with its mixture of fact and truths and memories of truths and its direction toward the Third Place, where the starting point is myth.""I like to see life with its teeth out.""It would be nice to travel if you knew where you were going and where you would live at the end or do we ever know, do we ever live where we live, we're always in other places, lost, like sheep.""They meant abnormal. Divisions of the kind were fashionable at that time, and it was so easy to stifle one's need to help by deciding that help could neither be accepted nor understood.""They think I'm going to be a schoolteacher but I'm going to be a poet.""Very often the law of extremity demands an attention to irrelevance.""Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination."
Janet Frame was born in Dunedin in the south-east of New Zealand's South Island as the third of five children of Scottish New Zealander parents. She grew up in a working class family. Her father, George Frame, worked for the New Zealand railways, and her mother Lottie (née Godfrey), served as a housemaid to the family of writer Katherine Mansfield. New Zealand's first female medical graduate, Dr Emily Hancock Siedeberg, delivered Frame at St. Helen's Hospital in 1924.
Frame spent her early childhood years in various small towns in New Zealand's South Island provinces of Otago and Southland, including Outram and Wyndham, before the family eventually settled in the coastal town of Oamaru (recognisable as the "Waimaru" of her début novel and subsequent fiction). As recounted in the first volume of her autobiographies, Frame's childhood was marred by the deaths of two of her adolescent sisters, Myrtle and Isabel, who drowned in separate incidents, and the epileptic seizures suffered by her brother George (referred to as "Geordie" and "Bruddie").
In 1943 Frame began training as a teacher at the Dunedin College of Education, auditing courses in English, French and psychology at the adjacent University of Otago. After completing two years of theoretical studies with mixed results, Frame started a year of practical placement at the Arthur Street School in Dunedin, which, according to her biographer, initially went quite well. Things started to unravel later that year when she attempted suicide with a packet of aspirin. Frame began regular therapy sessions with junior lecturer John Money, to whom she developed a strong attraction, and whose later work as a sexologist specialising in gender reassignment controversial.
In September 1945, Frame abandoned her teacher-training classroom at Dunedin's Arthur Street School during a visit from an inspector. She was then briefly admitted to the psychiatric ward of the local Dunedin hospital for observation. Frame was unwilling to return home to her family because of tension between her father and brother. Instead, she was committed to Seacliff Lunatic Asylum. During the next eight years, Frame was repeatedly readmitted, usually voluntarily, to psychiatric hospitals in New Zealand. These included Avondale, in Auckland, and Sunnyside in Christchurch. During this period, Frame was first diagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia, which was treated with electroconvulsive therapy and insulin.
