Janet Frame

Author profile

born

August 28, 1924 in Dunedin, New Zealand

died

January 29, 2004

gender

female

About this author

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The fate befalling the young woman who wanted "to be a poet" has been well documented. Desperately unhappy because of family tragedies and finding herself trapped in the wrong vocation (as a schoolteacher) her only escape appeared to be in submission to society's judgement of her as abnormal. She spent four and a half years out of eight years, incarcerated in mental hospitals. The story of her almost miraculous survival of the horrors and brutalising treatment in unenlightened institutions has become well known. She continued to write throughout her troubled years, and her first book (The Lagoon and Other Stories) won a prestigious literary prize, thus convincing her doctors not to carry out a planned lobotomy.

She returned to society, but n...more

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Books by Janet Frame

Average rating: 4.02 · 2,131 ratings · 214 reviews · 37 distinct works

	Owls Do Cry 4.07 avg rating — 291 ratings — published 1958 — 21 editions	My rating:
	An Angel at My Table 4.17 avg rating — 309 ratings — published 1984 — 15 editions	My rating:
	Faces In The Water 3.97 avg rating — 305 ratings — published 1961 — 6 editions	My rating:
	Janet Frame: An Autobiography; Volume One : To the Is-Land, Volume Two : An Angel at My Table, Volume Three : The Envoy from Mirror City/ 3 Volumes 4.35 avg rating — 223 ratings — 6 editions	My rating:
	Scented Gardens for the Blind 3.97 avg rating — 104 ratings — published 1963 — 3 editions	My rating:
	Towards Another Summer 3.75 avg rating — 137 ratings — published 2007 — 14 editions	My rating:
	To the Is-land: An Autobiography 3.92 avg rating — 114 ratings — published 1982 — 8 editions	My rating:
	The Carpathians 3.68 avg rating — 79 ratings — published 1988 — 4 editions	My rating:
	Living in the Maniototo 3.65 avg rating — 71 ratings — published 1979 — 4 editions	My rating:
	The Edge of the Alphabet 3.77 avg rating — 64 ratings — published 1991 — 3 editions	My rating:

More books by Janet Frame…

Series by Janet Frame

Janet Frame Autobiography (3 books)
by Janet Frame

4.10 avg rating — 481 ratings

Quotes by Janet Frame

“I don't want to inhabit the human world under false pretenses.”
― Janet Frame, Towards Another Summer

tags: identity , self-knowledge

16 people liked it

“Language, at least, may give up the secrets of life and death, leading us through the maze to the original Word as monster or angel, to the mournful place where we may meet Job and hear his cry, 'How long will you vex my soul and break me in pieces with words?”
― Janet Frame

11 people liked it

“So we went to bed, assaulted by sleep that fumed at us from medicine glasses, or was wielded from small sweet-coated tablets -- dainty bricks of dream wrapped in the silk stockings of oblivion.”
― Janet Frame

tags: writing

10 people liked it

See all Janet Frame's quotes »

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