Janet Frame at 100: From Poverty and Psychiatric Hospital to Literary Stardom

In February 1975, New Zealand writer Janet Frame was featured in a rare television interview by journalist Michael Noonan. This intimate retrospective, set on a beach near her home on the Whangaparāoa Peninsula, New Zealand, was created for the United Nations’ International Women’s Year. On screen, Frame appeared confident, relaxed, and witty, quite different from the introverted, reclusive figure portrayed in Jane Campion’s 1990 film An Angel at My Table. The film was based on Frame’s bestselling autobiography, which depicted her transformative struggle from poverty and mental illness into literary acclaim. When she passed away from leukemia on January 29, 2004, The New York Times labeled her a “writer who explored madness” in her obituary.

Celebrated across the UK and New Zealand this month for her centenary, Frame was indeed a writer who delved into madness, yet her work encompassed so much more. She was an internationally renowned, strikingly original author. Frame’s explorations illustrated the many facets of New Zealand’s identity, both for Māori and settlers, and stood in contrast to the nationalist realist traditions of early to mid-20th-century New Zealand literature, dominated by Pākehā male writers.

Frame’s early fiction is enriched with the poetry she memorized at school and the plays she listened to on the radio with her siblings. Her work is infused with the popular culture, and the domestic and public vernacular of working-class, small-town New Zealand during the depression and World War II. This was also reflected in her depiction of postwar England, where she lived from the late 1950s to the early 1960s, marked by its bitter cold and harsh dislocations.

The structure and strangeness of Frame’s work exhibit the influence of diverse writers like Stevie Smith, TS Eliot, and Virginia Woolf, yet her stories maintain a unique, fabular intensity. Her humor, often spiky, mischievous, and macabre, looks forward to the works of writers like Muriel Spark, Jenny Diski, Siri Hustvedt, and Alison Moore. Frame is the only New Zealand writer to have won national awards across poetry, short stories, novels, and autobiography categories. She won the Commonwealth Writers’ prize in 1988 for her novel The Carpathians, was awarded a CBE in 1983, and became an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1990, she was made a Member of the Order of New Zealand, the country’s highest civil honor. Renowned authors such as Hilary Mantel, Anita Brookner, Doris Lessing, and Michael Holroyd praised her autobiography as a masterpiece.

Frame’s survival and success are remarkable given her tumultuous early life. Born on August 28, 1924, in Dunedin, she was the third of five children in a family plagued by poverty and tragedy. The family faced additional hardships when her brother Geordie was diagnosed with epilepsy at age eight. Janet and her siblings grew up in rough coastal towns in ramshackle houses bereft of running water or electricity. These experiences became vivid elements in her fiction, filled with both everyday chores and stark realities.

The family endured the devastating loss of two daughters, Myrtle and Isabel, who drowned a decade apart due to the same heart condition. These events deeply affected Frame, leading to a misdiagnosis of schizophrenia during her time as a trainee teacher after a suicide attempt. She spent eight years in psychiatric hospitals subjected to countless ECT and insulin shock therapy sessions. Her writing, which she saw as a lifeline, literally saved her.

Frame’s short stories collection The Lagoon, published in 1951, won New Zealand’s Hubert Church Memorial Prize in 1952. Unknown to her at the time, the previous winner was Frank Sargeson, who later lent Frame his garden shed where she wrote her first novel, Owls Do Cry. This recognition saved her from a scheduled prefrontal lobotomy by confirming her literary prowess.

Later, a psychiatrist in London informed her that she had never been schizophrenic, prompting her to write about her experiences in the 1961 novel Faces in the Water. Frame’s work often explored themes of violent depersonalization and identity crises. Her literary executor and niece, Pamela Gordon, emphasizes focusing on Frame’s work rather than just the adversities catalogued in her biography.

Despite facing challenges from cultural and societal biases, including misogyny and class prejudice, Frame’s reputation endured. Emily Perkins, who won New Zealand’s top fiction prize, praises Frame’s poetic depiction of childhood’s beauty, bewilderment, and dread. Author Catherine Chidgey appreciates Frame’s representation of the natural world in New Zealand, while Kirsty Gunn recalls being captivated by Frame’s unique storytelling as a child.

In 1957, Frame traveled to Europe with a grant from the New Zealand Literary Fund, experiencing varied personal and professional moments in England and Ibiza. Her third novel, The Edge of the Alphabet, republished recently to commemorate her centenary, explores themes of identity and linguistic estrangement through its characters’ journeys.

Special events, reissues, and screenings mark Frame’s centenary, highlighting her enduring literary legacy. Despite financial and public challenges, it was her writing that solidified Frame’s place in literary history. Her autobiography’s success, exemplified in the film adaptation, brought her international recognition, cementing her as a significant literary figure. Frame spent much of her later life in New Zealand, where she continued to write until her passing in Dunedin. Her extraordinary vision persists, capturing the essence of existence and identity.

Source: The New York Times, Fitzcarraldo