Frame, Janet Paterson

▪ 2005

Janet Paterson Frame Clutha 

      New Zealand writer (b. Aug. 28, 1924, Dunedin, N.Z.—d. Jan. 29, 2004, Dunedin), created a unique body of work that presents perhaps the most recognized voice of New Zealand outside her native country. Although her early life was marked by poverty, illness, and the horrific deaths by drowning of two sisters, she developed an acute appreciation of language and literature. Intensely shy, Frame had a difficult adolescence and early adulthood, and she entered a psychiatric hospital in 1947. During the following eight years, she voraciously read literary classics. She was subject to frequent electroshock therapy and—but for a discovery that she had won a literary prize for The Lagoon (1951), her first book of stories—might have undergone a lobotomy (which severs the nerve fibres to the front of the brain). When she was released to the care of the writer Frank Sargeson, she struggled to readjust to life outside the hospital and to continue writing. Owls Do Cry (1957), her first novel, was followed by a number of other novels, including Faces in the Water (1961), The Edge of the Alphabet (1962), and Scented Gardens for the Blind (1963), in which she examined meaning in the lives of those on the margins of society from the perspective of one who knew. In addition to a volume of poetry, a children's book, and several more novels and collections of stories, Frame wrote three volumes of autobiography, To the Is-Land (1982), An Angel at My Table (1984), and The Envoy from Mirror City (1985), all of which were tapped for the widely popular movie of her life, An Angel at My Table (1990), by New Zealand director Jane Campion. In 1990 Frame was made a Member of the Order of New Zealand, the country's highest civil honour. In 2003 she received one of the inaugural Prime Minister's Awards for Literary Achievement, along with poet Hone Tuwhare and historian Michael King (q.v. (King, Michael )).

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