She sought the support and company of fellow writers and set out single-mindedly and courageously to achieve her goal of being a writer. She returned to society, but not the one which had labelled her a misfit. 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. The story of her almost miraculous survival of the horrors and brutalising treatment in unenlightened institutions has become well known. She spent four and a half years out of eight years, incarcerated in mental hospitals. 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. 'When I first read it at 14, the same age as Daphne is in the novel.her dark eloquent song captured my heart.The fate befalling the young woman who wanted "to be a poet" has been well documented. ' Owls Do Cry glows with the inner light of (Frame's) human awareness - a cool flame that neither cauterises nor heals but in some mystic ways purifies, substituting an essential beauty for superficial pain and squalor.' Sunday Herald Tribune Her autobiographical work An Angel at My Table was made into a film by Jane Campion in 1990. Born in Dunedin in 1924, she published twenty-one books in her lifetime and several posthumously.
Janet Frame is one of New Zealand's greatest writers.
Janet Frame writes of hardship, poverty and tragedy with beauty and a deep sensitivity. Owls Do Cry tells the story of the Withers family: Francie, who is twelve and about to start work at the woollen mills, hard drudgery sweetened with the thrill of riding a bike to work Toby, who would rather play at the dump than go to school, where the dark velvet cloak of epilepsy often wraps itself around him Chicks, the youngest and Daphne, whose rich poetic way of seeing the world leads to a heartbreaking life in institutions.
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