An Autobiography by Janet Frame

First published: 1991 (To the Is-Land, 1982; An Angel at My Table, 1984; The Envoy from Mirror City, 1985)

Type of work: Autobiography

Time of work: 1924 to the 1960’s

Locale: New Zealand, England, and Spain

Principal Personages:

• Janet Frame, a New Zealand writer who overcame poverty, a troubled family life, and mental illness
• George Samuel Frame, Janet’s father
• Lottie Godfrey Frame, Janet’s mother
• Frank Sargeson, a writer who supports Janet’s work and provides her with a temporary home
• Myrtle Frame, Janet’s older sister, who drowns at sixteen
• Robert “Bruddie” Frame, Janet’s only brother, who suffers from epilepsy
• Isabel Frame, Janet’s younger sister, who also drowns as a young woman
• June Frame, Janet’s youngest sister

Form and Content

An Autobiography is New Zealand author Janet Frame’s three-volume examination of her life from her birth through the early years of her career as a writer. The volumes were published separately over a four-year period, and each one deals with a distinct phase of Frame’s life. The first volume, To the Is-Land, looks at the years of her childhood until her departure from home for teachers college. The second, An Angel at My Table, deals with her training as a teacher, her nervous breakdown and the years of hospitalization that followed, and her gradual emergence as a promising young writer. The final volume, The Envoy from Mirror City, tells of her travels to England and Spain, her first experiences with love, her growing success as a writer, and her eventual return to New Zealand.

Frame’s life story is a compelling one, marked by poverty, hardship, illness, and her long struggle to come to terms with herself and her need for self-expression through writing. The early years of her childhood are among the book’s happiest. With the arrival of the Great Depression in the 1930’s, however, the mood of family life gradually changes as the pressures facing her father sometimes bring out a difficult, even cruel, side to his character. The situation is exacerbated by the onset of her brother’s epilepsy. As her family’s internal structure begins to fray, Janet also faces problems at school, where, although she is an excellent student, she remains an outsider. Her sister Myrtle’s death by drowning is a devastating blow for the family, yet Frame continues to excel academically and, inspired by her love of literature, begins to write poetry.

In the book’s second volume, Frame leaves her family for the first time to attend teaching college, although she continues to dream of becoming a writer. Painfully shy, she has difficulty making friends and is also ill at ease with the aunt and uncle with whom she lives. After completing her training, she finishes a year as a probationary teacher but flees the classroom on the day she is to be observed by the school inspector. The action puts an end to her future as a teacher and marks the beginning of her long slide into emotional despair. An unsuccessful suicide attempt leads to her hospitalization in a mental institution, where Frame is wrongly diagnosed as schizophrenic and left largely untreated in conditions that serve only to worsen her emotional state. Her twenties, which are also marked by the deaths of her mother and her sister Isabel, are divided between long stays in institutions and brief periods spent working at low-paying, menial jobs. She continues her writing, however, and receives a literary prize while still hospitalized that eventually leads to her friendship with fellow writer Frank Sargeson. Sargeson offers her a place to live and write upon her release, and at his urging, she also applies for and receives a government travel grant.

In the book’s third volume, Frame lives for a time in England and in Spain in an attempt to “broaden her experience.” Still shy and unsure of herself, she has her first experience with love with an American she meets in Ibiza, Spain. The affair ends unhappily, and Frame suffers a miscarriage before drifting into a second relationship, which she breaks off to return to England. There she begins an extensive course of psychotherapy and devotes herself to her writing, publishing several novels and stories. Her father’s death leads her to return to New Zealand, where she decides she will remain, exploring the country of her birth for its literary potential.

Context

An Autobiography is a powerful account of one woman’s difficult journey from childhood through a painful adolescence and young adulthood to her gradual emergence as a writer. Frame’s book is a testament to the determination to write that somehow survived her devastating years of hospitalization and personal tragedy, and her story is an illuminating look at a writer’s development. Frame’s growth as a writer is chronicled throughout the book, beginning with her first improvised story as a small child. She discusses both the joy and the salvation that she found in writing and the difficult and day-to-day tedium of sitting alone in a room with only her typewriter for company; one of the book’s most important contributions is the success with which it conveys a sense of the writer’s life.

Beautifully written itself, the book is also a celebration of the writers whose work inspired and influenced Frame. She quotes frequently from poems that were important to her throughout the various stages of her life and describes the chords that they struck in her own experience. Frame’s love of literature is a sustaining force in her troubled life, and her own need to write is both a lifesaving means of self-expression and a longing to become a part of the creative realm that has played such a crucial role in her own development. Her autobiography explores the link between the artist and the world of art that has preceded her; for Frame, this connection also prompted a desire to live and work in New Zealand, where the lack of an extensive literary tradition casts her in the role of a writer who will help shape that tradition.

Several of Frame’s novels deal with mental illness and patients in psychiatric hospitals, and her autobiography provides the personal background for these works. Indeed, she does not present a detailed description of her hospitalization as a result of her feeling that she has covered this ground sufficiently in her fiction. An Autobiography is therefore an intrinsic part of her body of work, supplying a context within which her fiction may be viewed.

The book was also the inspiration for New Zealand director Jane Campion’s film An Angel at My Table (1991), which, although it takes its title from the central section, covers all three volumes of the autobiography. Frame’s wish, upon her return to New Zealand at the book’s close, to become one of her country’s “mythmakers” has had repercussions that she could not then have imagined: Her work and her life itself have touched her fellow artists and have found an audience throughout the world.

Bibliography

Frame, Janet. The Carpathians. New York: George Braziller, 1988. In this novel, a woman from New York moves to a small New Zealand town. This meditative exploration of inner and outer worlds received the 1989 Commonwealth Writers Prize.

Frame, Janet. Faces in the Water. New York: George Braziller, 1961. Frame’s fictional portrait of a woman’s hospitalization in a mental institution draws on her own experiences. Its heroine, Istina Mavet, undergoes the trauma of mental illness amid New Zealand’s then-primitive approach to treatment.

Frame, Janet. Living in the Maniototo. New York: George Braziller, 1979. A strange, comic story centering on a woman with multiple identities, among them a writer and a ventriloquist. The novel is an exploration of the creative process.

Frame, Janet. Owls Do Cry. New York: George Braziller, 1960. Frame’s first novel draws heavily on her own New Zealand childhood and family life. The book helped to establish her literary reputation.

Frame, Janet. A State of Siege. New York: George Braziller, 1966. This novel offers a perceptive, thought-provoking examination of the psyche of a woman who, freed from difficult responsibilities, retreats to an idyllic island.