The trilogy is built along the lines of a Bildungsroman – ‘The Sorrows of Janet Frame’ – in that it follows the heroine/narrator/ author from her birth till the age of 40 or so. For years – between twenty and thirty – she was a non-person, sharing the lot of children and mad people who are forever ‘they’ or the alienating, destroying third person. However, the Autobiography can also be read as the revenge of an ‘I’ that had been silenced for so long: ‘with the autobiography it was the desire really to make myself a first person’ Frame says in one of the rare interviews she gave. She could have developed a legitimate distrust for a genre that had cost her so much. Janet’s autobiography had an enormous effect on me.The writing of an autobiography might seem surprising in Frame's case as she was sent to a psychiatric hospital on the strength of an autobiographical essay in which she had related a suicide attempt.
‘One of the most beautiful and moving books I have ever read. This edition contains all three volumes of Frame’s autobiography: To the Is-Land, An Angel at My Table and An Envoy from Mirror City. As she says more than once in this autobiography: ‘My writing saved me.’ She then went on to become New Zealand’s most acclaimed writer.
She escaped undergoing a lobotomy when it was discovered that she had just won a national literary prize. It is a heroic story, and told with such engaging tone, humorous perspective and imaginative power’ Michael Holroyd, Sunday TimesĪfter being misdiagnosed with schizophrenia as a young woman, Janet Frame spent several years in psychiatric institutions. One of the great autobiographies of the twentieth century … A journey from luminous childhood, through the dark experiences of supposed madness, to the renewal of her life through writing fiction.
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