New Zealand author Janet Frame (1924-2004) during her lifetime published 11 novels, three collections of short stories, a volume of poetry and a children's book. The details of her life--her tragic early years, her confinement in a psychiatric hospital and her miraculous reprieve--overshadow her work and she remains largely neglected by scholars. These essays focus on Frame's autobiography, short stories and novels. Contributors from around the world explore a range of topics, including her mother's Christadelphian faith, her relationships with two 20th century icons (William Theophilus Brown and John Money), and a view of Frame in the context of trauma studies. Two of the essays were presented at the 2014 Northeast Modern Language Association convention.
First published in New Zealand in 1957, Owls Do Cry, was Janet Frame's second book and the first of her thirteen novels. Now approaching its 60th anniversary, it is securely a landmark in Frame's catalog and indeed a landmark of modernist literature. The novel spans twenty years in the Withers family, tracing Daphne's coming of age into a post–war New Zealand too narrow to know what to make of her. She is deemed mad, institutionalized, and made to undergo a risky lobotomy. Margaret Drabble calls Owls Do Cry "a song of survival"—it is Daphne's song of survival but also the author's: Frame was herself misdiagnosed with schizophrenia and scheduled for brain surgery. She was famously saved only when she won New Zealand's premier fiction prize. Frame was among the first major writers of the twentieth century to confront life in mental institutions and Owls Do Cry is important for this perspective. But it is equally valuable for its poetry, its incisive satire, and its acute social observations. A sensitively rendered portrait of childhood and adolescence and a testament to the power of imagination, this early novel is a first–rate example of Frame's powerful, lyric, and original prose.
Janet Frame, born in 1924, is New Zealand's most celebrated and least public author. Her early life in small South Island towns seemed, at times, engulfed in a tide of doom: one brother still-born, another epileptic; two sisters dead of heart failure while swimming; Frame herself committed to mental hospitals for the best part of a decade. Later, her surviving sister was temporarily felled in adulthood by a stroke, an uncle cut his throat and a cousin shot his lover, his lover's parents and then himself. This, then, is an inspiring biography of a woman who climbed out of an abyss of unhappiness to take control of her life and become one of the great writers of her time. And to enable her biographer to write this book scrupulously and honestly, Janet Frame spoke for the first time about her whole life. She also made available her personal papers and directed her family and friends to be equally communicative. The result is a biography of astonishing intimacy and frankness, written by multi-award-winning author, Dr Michael King.
'One of the most impressive accounts of madness to be found in literature' ANITA BROOKNER 'Lyrical, touching and deeply entertaining' JOHN MORTIMER, OBSERVER 'Any one of her books could be published today and it would be ground-breaking' ELEANOR CATTON 'I was now an established citizen with little hope of returning across the frontier; I was in the crazy world, separated now by more than locked doors and barred windows from the people who called themselves sane.' When Janet Frame's doctor suggested that she write about her traumatic experiences in mental institutions in order to free herself from them, the result was Faces in the Water, a powerful and poignant novel. Istina Mavet descends through increasingly desolate wards, with the threat of leucotomy ever present. As she observes her fellow patients, long dismissed by hospital staff with humour and compassion, she reveals her original and questing mind. This riveting novel became an international classic, translated into nine languages, and has also been used as a medical school text. Books included in the VMC 40th anniversary series include: Frost in May by Antonia White; The Collected Stories of Grace Paley; Fire from Heaven by Mary Renault; The Magic Toyshop by Angela Carter; The Weather in the Streets by Rosamond Lehmann; Deep Water by Patricia Highsmith; The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West; Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston; Heartburn by Nora Ephron; The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy; Memento Mori by Muriel Spark; A View of the Harbour by Elizabeth Taylor; and Faces in the Water by Janet Frame
In Janet Frame: Semiotics and Biosemiotics in Her Early Fiction, Paul Matthew St. Pierre exploits the linguistic discipline of semiotics and the neurobiological discipline of biosemiotics to propose an original and dynamic reading of the first four works of fiction by New Zealand writer Janet Frame (1924-2004): The Lagoon: Stories (1951), Owls Do Cry (1957), Faces in the Water (1961), and The Edge of the Alphabet (1962). Opposing the prevailing reading of Frame's early fiction as autobiographical, deriving from her medical history, he argues her books are singular evocations of her astonishing imagination. His purpose is to fix this historical record and provide an alternative model for interpreting one of the 20th century's most stylistically demanding and rewarding writers. Semiotics and biosemiotics are his means for unlocking the early fiction and her later works to a polemical analysis focusing on language, sign transmissions, writing the body, and the biosemiotic self. In The Lagoon, Owls Do Cry, Faces in the Water, and The Edge of the Alphabet Frame produced what St. Pierre interprets as an original semiotic and biosemiotic modeling system that she applied throughout her oeuvre of twenty books, comprising eight story collections, seven novels, a book of poetry, a children's novel, and three volumes of autobiography. Using this modeling system, she designed her fiction as a visual verbal field consisting of still and moving images generated in the imagination, located in the brains and central nervous systems of her narrators, characters, and readers, and, primarily, of the author herself. The author discusses the significations of: 1) Frame's image-signs in water, glass, photographs, film, membranes, skin, and clothing; 2) her primary sign repertoire of objects, language, and human persons in the figures of blood, skin, and sun; 3) her body-signs, including those generated in the circulatory and neurological systems of all human organisms as biosemiotic living systems, in facial displays and body parts such as teeth, temples, eyes, skin, hair, nostrils, shoulders, knees, cheeks, vaginas, and prefrontal lobes; 4) her theories of the body, normalcy, and selfhood in the figures of urine, feces, blood, sweat, bile, saliva, phlegm, and semen, and body parts such as feet, hands, noses, teeth, lips, entrails, and wombs, in the context of social forces of dismemberment; 5) her biosemiotic system applied to her subsequent books, constituting her theory of human beings as sign-transmitting organisms, living systems doubled with and interchangeable with the closed sign system of her oeuvre. Janet Frame: Semiotics and Biosemiotics in Her Early Fiction is designed to appeal to the international audience of Frame readers and a specialized audience of semioticians and biosemioticians who investigate how sign transmissions function in visual verbal fields and related living systems.
"Janet Frame (1924-2004) was one of New Zealand's foremost modern writers, best-known for her prizewinning novels and for the three-volume autobiography later adapted by Jane Campion into her film An Angel." "She published only one collection in her lifetime, The Pocket Mirror in 1967, but she never stopped writing poetry, allowing the manuscripts to accumulate in an old fibreglass bowl she'd originally used as a bath for her geese. Her second, posthumous collection The Goose Bath (2006) was compiled from this treasure trove, but not published outside New Zealand. Storms Will Tell is a comprehensive selection of her beautiful and thought-provoking poems drawn from both those books." "Her poems illustrate the shape of Janet Frame's life: her childhood and later years in mental hospitals blighted by misdiagnosis of schizophrenia; her travels around the world, including her time in Engl her life as a writer and return to New Zeal growing older and facing illness and death. There are love poems, meditations on mortality, flashes of humour and startling imagery. And always she celebrates the power of the human imagination."--BOOK JACKET.
'Frame . . . is a master . . . All [stories] overflow with dazzling observation and unforgettable metaphor . . . A powerful collection.' —Kirkus 'This is a gem of a book, or rather a string of gems, each uniquely coloured, cut and crafted.' —Landfall This brand new collection of 28 short stories by Janet Frame spans the length of her career and contains some of the best she wrote. None of these stories has been published in a collection before, and more than half are published for the first time in Gorse is Not People. The title story caused Frame a setback in 1954, when Charles Brasch rejected it for publication in Landfall and, along with others for one reason or other, deliberately remained unpublished during her lifetime. Previously published pieces have appeared in Harper's Bazaar, the NZ Listener, the New Zealand School Journal, Landfall and The New Yorker over the years, and one otherwise unpublished piece, 'The Gravy Boat', was read aloud by Frame for a radio broadcast in 1953. In these stories readers will recognise familiar themes, scenes, characters and locations from Frame's writing and life, and each offers a fresh fictional transformation that will captivate and absorb.
This collection of essays draws on critical frameworks to explore fresh ways of looking at Frame's fiction, poetry, and autobiography. At the same time, the essays plug into the energy of Frame's work to challenge our thinking within and beyond these frameworks. Frameworks offers a perspective on Frame studies today, showcasing its major concerns as well as heralding new narratives for the decade ahead. Mindful of preceding Frame criticism, these essays use their contemporary vantage-point to recast seminal questions about the relationship between Janet Frame's work and its critical contexts.
