Description

The autobiography of New Zealand s most significant writer 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. This book contains selections from the long out-of-print collection entitled Janet Frame: An Autobiography (George Brazillier, 1991), which itself was originally published in three volumes: To the Is-land, An Angel at My Table, and The Envoy from Mirror City.