Janet Frame Books

New Zealand's preeminent writer brings the skill of an extraordinary novelist and poet to these vivid and haunting recollections.

After being misdiagnosed with schizophrenia as a young woman, Janet Frame spent several years in psychiatric institutions. She escaped undergoing a lobotomy when it was discovered that she had just won a national literary prize. She then went on to become New Zealand's most acclaimed writer. As she says more than once in this autobiography: 'My writing saved me.'

'One of the most impressive accounts of madness to be found in literature ... A masterpiece' Anita BrooknerPublished as part of a beautifully designed series to mark the 40th anniversary of the Virago Modern Classics.

We follow Mavid through two marriages and watch her bury two husbands. Above all, we are privy to the attendant avoidances, interruptions, and irrelevancies that are part of her attempt to complete a novel. It's a process that is painful, joyful, rueful, and profound. Through it all, Violet-Alice-Mavis chooses to be the entertainer, to make us laugh and cry, to be the ventriloquist who dares to enter the speech of others and expose them.

Owls Do Cry is Janet Frames first novel. She describes her ideas behind it in the second volume of her autobiography: "Pictures of great treasure in the midst of sadness and waste haunted me and I began to think, in fiction, of a childhood, home life, hospital life, using people known to me as a base for the main character, and inventing minor characters. For Daphne I chose a sensitive, poetic frail person, who, I hoped, would give depth to inner worlds and perhaps a clearer, at least an individual, perception of outer worlds. The other characters, similarly fictional, were used to portray aspects of my 'message' - the excessively material outlooks of 'Chicks', the confusion of Toby, the earthy make-up of Francie, and the toiling parents, the nearest characters to my own parents.

'I'm a short story addict, both reading and writing them, and I always keep hoping for the perfect story.' (Janet Frame to Tim Curnow, January 1984) PRIZES: SELECTED SHORT STORIES is the most comprehensive selection of Janet Frame's stories ever published, taken from the four different collections released during her lifetime and featuring many of her best stories. Written over four decades, they come from her classic prize-winning collection THE LAGOON AND OTHER STORIES first published in 1952, right up to the volume YOU ARE NOW ENTERING THE HUMAN HEART published in the 1980s. This new selection also includes five works that have not been collected before. Janet Frame's versatility dazzles. Her themes range from childhood to old age to death and beyond. Within the pages of one book the reader is transported from small town New Zealand to inner city London, and from realism to fantasy. This volume offers the perfect sample of the many styles of Janet Frame's unique and powerful writing. 'Quite simply, she's a stunning writer' - Dominion Post (September 2007) 'Frame is, and will remain, divine.' - Alice Sebold

"[This book] is [an] ... account of a childhood and adolescence in a New Zealand family in the 1920s and 1930s. ... Its ... language brings alive in vivid detail her home, materially poor but intellectually intense, and her first encounters with love and death. It follows [Frame's] explorations into the worlds of words and poetry. ..."--Back cover

New Zealand's preeminent writer Janet Frame brings the skill of an extraordinary novelist and poet to these vivid and haunting recollections, gathered here for the first time in a single volume. From a childhood and adolescence spent in a poor but intellectually intense railway family, through life as a student, and years of incarceration in mental hospitals, eventually followed by her entry into the saving world of writers and the "Mirror City" that sustains them, we are given not only a record of the events of a life, but also "the transformation of ordinary facts and ideas into a shining palace of mirrors." Frame's journey of self-discovery, from New Zealand to London, to Paris and Barcelona, and then home again, is a heartfelt and courageous account of a writer's beginnings as well as one woman's personal struggle to survive.