Janet Paterson Frame (1924–2004,) fully Janet Paterson Frame Clutha, was a New Zealand writer of novels, short fiction, and poetry. Her books explore the depths of alienation and isolation drawn from her experiences of psychiatric hospitals.
Born in Dunedin and educated at Otago University and Dunedin Teachers’ Training College. Her first book was a collection of short stories, The Lagoon: Stories (1951,) which she followed with the novel Owls Do Cry (1956.)
After a nervous breakdown as a young woman, Frame was confined to a mental institution for ten years, misdiagnosed as schizophrenic, and subjected to two hundred electroshock treatments. She was released when the hospital director was informed that The Lagoon had won New Zealand’s most prestigious prize for fiction.
Frame novels describe an existence in which the looming threat of disorder both attracts and frightens. She is best known for Scented Gardens for the Blind (1963,) A State of Siege (1966,) Intensive Care (1970,) and Living in the Maniototo (1979.) Her short stories have been collected in The Reservoir and Other Stories (1966,) and You are Now Entering the Human Heart (1983,) and some early verse was published as The Pocket Mirror (1967.)
The background to Frame’s work is implicit in three volumes of memoirs, To the Island (1982,) An Angel at My Table (1984, filmed 1990,) and The Envoy from Mirror City (1985.) Her final novel, The Carpathians, was published in 1988, a few years before she suffered two strokes.
Historian Michael King wrote the biography Wrestling with the Angel: A Life of Janet Frame (2000.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Janet Frame
For your own good is a persuasive argument that will eventually make a man agree to his own destruction.
—Janet Frame
Topics: Arguments, Persuasion
Very often the law of extremity demands an attention to irrelevance.
—Janet Frame
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.
—Janet Frame
Topics: Tourism, Travel
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
Topics: Fiction, Authors & Writing
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