- Frame, Janet
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in full Janet Paterson Frame Cluthaborn Aug. 28, 1924, Dunedin, N.Z.New Zealand novelist, short-story writer, and poet.After an impoverished childhood, she trained as a teacher. Her first book was the story collection The Lagoon (1951). Several times committed to mental institutions, she narrowly escaped undergoing a frontal lobotomy. Her novel Owls Do Cry (1957) incorporated poetry and prose in its investigation of the border between sanity and madness. Her many other novels, several of which draw on Maori legends, include Scented Gardens for the Blind (1963) and The Carpathians (1988). One of her three volumes of memoirs, An Angel at My Table (1984), was filmed by Jane Campion.
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▪ New Zealander writerin full Janet Paterson Frame Cluthaborn August 28, 1924, Dunedin, New Zealanddied January 29, 2004, Dunedinleading New Zealand writer of novels, short fiction, and poetry. Her works were noted for their explorations of alienation and isolation.Frame's early years were traumatic. Her childhood was marked by poverty and the drowning deaths of two sisters, and in 1945, while studying to be a teacher, she suffered a breakdown. Misdiagnosed as a schizophrenic, she spent nearly a decade in psychiatric hospitals. During this time she read the classics voraciously and began to write. In 1951, while still a patient, her 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. Frame 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.Frame's first novel, Owls Do Cry (1957), was an experimental book, incorporating both poetry and prose and lacking a conventional plot. It investigates the worth of the individual and the ambiguous border between sanity and madness. In all her novels, Frame depicts a society deprived of wholeness by its refusal to come to terms with disorder, irrationality, and madness. Among her later novels are Faces in the Water (1961), The Edge of the Alphabet (1962), Snowman, Snowman: Fables and Fantasies (1963), Scented Gardens for the Blind (1963), The Adaptable Man (1965), A State of Siege (1966), The Rainbirds (1968), Intensive Care (1970), Daughter Buffalo (1972), Living in the Maniototo (1979), and The Carpathians (1988).Frame also wrote three volumes of memoirs, To the Is-land (1982), An Angel at My Table (1984), and The Envoy from Mirror City (1985). These autobiographical works were adapted for a critically acclaimed film, An Angel at My Table (1990), directed by Jane Campion. Towards Another Summer, an autobiographical novel Frame wrote in 1963 but deemed too personal for publication until after her death, was released in 2007. Frame received numerous honours, and in 1983 she was made Commander of the British Empire (CBE).Additional ReadingMichael King, Wrestling with the Angel: A Life of Janet Frame (2000); Judith Dell Panny, I Have What I Gave: The Fiction of Janet Frame, rev. ed. (2002).* * *
Universalium. 2010.
