04/12/2025
In the 1940s, Janet Frame was a quiet girl growing up in New Zealand's South Island with a fierce love for writing and a childhood marked by tragedy. Her father worked for the railways. Her mother sold poetry door-to-door to help feed five children through the Depression. They were poor, but Janet found refuge in literature—reading Keats and Whitman, writing her own poems, imagining worlds beyond the small coastal town of Oamaru.
Then the tragedies began.
Her brother George developed epilepsy in 1932. The seizures were violent, the prescribed bromide made him more so, and the family dynamics fractured under the strain. Her father believed George could overcome the seizures through willpower. Her brother wore Highland regalia in public. Janet watched the family tear itself apart.
On March 5, 1937, when Janet was twelve, her sixteen-year-old sister Myrtle went swimming at the Oamaru Tepid Baths. She didn't come home. Myrtle had drowned—a congenital heart defect no one knew about had stopped her heart in the water. Janet stayed behind that day while Myrtle went swimming. The guilt would haunt her.
She turned to poetry. "To my amazement I discovered that many of the poets knew about Myrtle's death and how strange it was without her," she later wrote. Literature became her way of processing grief, of making sense of loss that made no sense.
Exactly ten years later, on February 17, 1947, lightning struck the same family twice. Janet's younger sister Isabel, twenty-one years old, drowned in Picton Harbour. The same congenital heart defect. The same terrible ending. Two sisters, both lost to water, a decade apart.
"I cannot bear to be thinking that tonight outside in the dark I have two drowned sisters, even colder than any live people," Janet wrote.
By then, she was a young woman studying to become a teacher at Dunedin College of Education, auditing courses at the University of Otago. She was brilliant but desperately shy. Social interaction felt almost painful. She longed to enter the student common room but couldn't bring herself to walk through the door. She wrote poems and short stories about her inner life that got published in student magazines. She felt perpetually out of place, as if the world was walking through her without consent.
In 1945, while practice-teaching at Arthur Street School in Dunedin, a school inspector arrived to observe her classroom. Janet panicked. She bolted from the building and attempted su***de. Her university tutor, John Money, facilitated her committal to the psychiatric ward at Dunedin Public Hospital. From there, she was transferred to Seacliff Mental Hospital—a fabled and feared institution twenty miles north of Dunedin, where patients disappeared into stone buildings and rarely came out the same.
A doctor diagnosed her with incipient schizophrenia. The diagnosis was based on the word of an unqualified university tutor and made without proper medical investigation. It would follow her for the next eight years.
Janet was released briefly to her parents' care in Oamaru. She tried to work as a boarding-house maid. She tried to write. Then Isabel drowned in February 1947, and the crisis overwhelmed her. She was readmitted—this time to Sunnyside Mental Hospital in Christchurch, where in 1948 she received her first electroconvulsive therapy treatment.
The treatment made everything worse. Her symptoms intensified. Her fears deepened. She was recommitted to Seacliff in October 1948, this time by her mother. Over the next eight years, Janet Frame cycled through New Zealand's psychiatric institutions: Seacliff, Avondale Lunatic Asylum in Auckland, back to Sunnyside. Sometimes she admitted herself voluntarily. Sometimes she was committed. Always, the diagnosis followed her. Schizophrenia. Incurable. Dangerous to herself.
The treatment was brutal. Electroconvulsive therapy—repeatedly. Insulin shock therapy. Confinement. Probationary releases to her parents, followed by readmissions. She was treated not as a gifted writer struggling with grief and social anxiety, but as a broken brain that needed to be shocked into compliance.
By 1951, she had endured approximately 200 electroshock treatments.
The doctors concluded she was incurable. They recommended a prefrontal lobotomy—a surgical procedure that would sever the connections in her brain's frontal lobe. The surgery was standard practice at the time for patients deemed hopeless. It was performed thousands of times across the world, rendering patients docile, tractable, and often unable to think creatively or live independently. For a writer, it would be a death sentence.
Janet's mother signed the permission forms. The surgery was scheduled. Janet was not told. She remained in Seacliff, waiting without knowing what was about to happen to her.
Meanwhile, outside the hospital walls, something else was happening.
Throughout her hospitalizations, Janet had continued writing. She filled notebooks with poems and short stories. Writer John Money, the same tutor who had facilitated her first committal, had also taken some of her early writings and compiled them into a collection. In 1951, while Janet was still a patient at Seacliff, the Caxton Press published her first book: The Lagoon and Other Stories.
The collection was extraordinary. The stories explored isolation, alienation, the experience of people who didn't fit into the normal world. They were brilliantly written, deeply perceptive, unlike anything being published in New Zealand at the time.
In December 1952, The Lagoon was awarded the Hubert Church Memorial Award—at that time one of New Zealand's most prestigious literary prizes for prose.
The news reached Seacliff. Hospital staff were stunned. The woman they had diagnosed as hopelessly insane, the patient scheduled for a lobotomy that would permanently alter her brain, had just won the country's top literary award.
Dr. Geoffrey Blake-Palmer, Seacliff's superintendent, made a decision. He canceled the surgery. In his medical judgment, winning a national literary prize was incompatible with the permanence of schizophrenia. If she could write stories that good, perhaps she wasn't as incurable as they'd thought.
The lobotomy was forbidden. Janet Frame's brain was saved by her own words.
She was eventually released in 1955, after one final stay at Seacliff from December 1954 to March 1955. Writer Frank Sargeson—a central figure in New Zealand's literary community—invited her to live in an old army hut on his property in Takapuna. There, in that shack, Janet Frame wrote her first novel: Owls Do Cry, published in 1957 to critical acclaim.
She left New Zealand in 1956 and lived in Europe—primarily London, with sojourns to Ibiza and Andorra. In 1958, she legally changed her name to Nene Janet Paterson Clutha to make herself harder to find and to honor the Clutha River that had inspired her writing.
That same year, she admitted herself to the Maudsley Institute in London. There, psychiatrist Alan Miller examined her and delivered a verdict that vindicated everything she had suffered: Janet Frame had never had schizophrenia. She was suffering not from mental illness but from the effects of prolonged hospitalization and brutal treatment. Another psychiatrist, Robert Hugh Cawley, became her mentor—her "locksmith," as she later called him—helping free her from the damage of her misdiagnosis.
He encouraged her to write about her experiences. She did. Faces in the Water, published in 1961, was a fictionalized account of her time in New Zealand's mental institutions—exquisitely written, devastating, impossible to forget.
Janet Frame went on to write eleven novels, five collections of stories, poetry, and a children's book during her lifetime. She became one of New Zealand's greatest writers. She was twice rumored to be shortlisted for the Nobel Prize. In 1983, she was made Commander of the Order of the British Empire. In 1990, she received the Order of New Zealand—her country's highest civil honor.
In the 1980s, approaching sixty, she wrote a three-volume autobiography to set the record straight about her life: To the Is-Land (1982), An Angel at My Table (1984), and The Envoy from Mirror City (1985). The trilogy revealed the full story of her misdiagnosis, her suffering, and her survival. Film director Jane Campion adapted the autobiography into An Angel at My Table in 1990, bringing Janet Frame's story to a worldwide audience.
Janet Frame died on January 29, 2004, at age seventy-nine in Dunedin—the same city where her nightmare had begun. She died of leukemia, with her brain intact, her voice preserved, her words still resonating.
Her story stands as proof that a single achievement can change the trajectory of an entire life. If The Lagoon hadn't won that award, if the news hadn't reached Seacliff when it did, if the superintendent hadn't canceled the surgery, Janet Frame would have been lobotomized. The brilliant mind that created Owls Do Cry, Faces in the Water, The Carpathians, and dozens of other works would have been permanently altered. The woman who became New Zealand's literary icon would have been reduced to a surgical casualty.
Instead, her words saved her. And those same words went on to inspire millions—a testament to the power of literature, the resilience of the human spirit, and the terrifying fragility of the line between being seen as mad and being recognized as a genius.
Credit - Two Pennies.
