From poverty, psychiatric hospital and writing in a shed to literary stardom: Janet Frame at 100

The New Zealand author channelled her experience of tragedy and mental illness with dazzling results. Now centenary celebrations will ensure her extraordinary vision lives on

In February 1975 the New Zealand writer Janet Frame was the subject of a rare interview for television conducted by the journalist Michael Noonan. This relaxed, intimate retrospective of her life and work – Frame and Noonan stroll, laughing together, at the height of summer along a sea-swept beach near her then home on the Whangaparāoa Peninsula, north of Auckland – was made as part of a project to mark the United Nations’ International Women’s Year. Frame would turn 51 that August; on screen she comes across as confident, relaxed, witty and thoughtful, far removed from the introverted and reclusive former psychiatric patient portrayed in Jane Campion’s 1990 film An Angel at My Table. Based on Frame’s bestselling autobiography, it is a legend-enforcing depiction of how Frame transformed her early background of poverty, tragedy and mental illness into literature. The New York Times obituary published the day after her death from leukaemia on 29 January 2004 would categorise Frame in its headline as a “writer who explored madness”.

Frame, whose centenary is celebrated this month with events in the UK and New Zealand, was indubitably a writer “who explored madness”, and yet so much more – internationally renowned, strikingly original and unclassifiable, a dazzling interpreter of and innovator in language, a shrewd investigator of the postcolonial world and New Zealand’s projected image of itself. She was a linguistic explorer into the many meanings of that island nation – for both Māori and settler – and an antidote to the “Man Alone” nationalist realist tradition of Pākehā (white European) male writers that dominated New Zealand literature of the early to mid-20th century.

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