She was afraid to enter the student common room, although she longed to do so, but wrote poems and short stories about her inner life that were published in student publications.Īt 21 she found herself unable to continue with her new teaching job. Studying at teachers college and the University of Dunedin during World War II was both liberating and terrifying.
She found normal interaction with other people almost painful, and in her loneliness turned to literature and the resources of her imagination. Frame wrote in a letter: “I cannot bear to be thinking that tonight outside in the dark I have two drowned sisters, even colder than any live people.”įrame lived a socially restricted life, and as she grew up became inordinately shy. She was the victim of a congenital heart defect-the same condition that claimed the third sister Isabel, who died 10 years later at the age of 21 in another drowning accident. When the son George, developed epilepsy, the family’s meagre funds went on a fruitless search to find a cure for his condition.Įven more tragically, Janet’s older sister Myrtle, aged 16, went swimming one summer afternoon at the local pool, and drowned. Her father was a railway worker and later an engine driver, and although he kept his job during the 1930s Depression, the family had little money to spare. It had the hallmark of authenticity, much of it based on her own experiences.īorn in 1924, Frame grew up in the South Island of New Zealand, the second daughter in a family of four girls and a boy.
She was one of New Zealand’s best-known writers and her life became the subject of Jane Campion’s 1990 film An Angel at My Table, which earned her books an even wider audience.įrame’s best writing provides an account of complex and tormented psychological states.
Prolific author Janet Frame died on January 29 of leukemia aged 79.
0 kommentar(er)
