Janet Frame: famously shy, profoundly gifted

By SCOTT MacLEOD

To most people Janet Frame was this nation's finest novelist, but to her sister June Gordon she was a best friend.

The great writer was someone who "usually pushed problems aside and overcame them", Mrs Gordon said.

But Frame could not overcome cancer. The 79-year-old died yesterday morning in Dunedin Hospital of acute myeloid leukaemia, a cancer of the blood and bone marrow.

The sisters grew close as children living in South Island railway shacks with their parents, George and Lottie, and three siblings.

Mrs Gordon visited Frame during the eight years she spent in mental hospitals, enduring 200 electric shocks and escaping a lobotomy only because her writings were praised. Six years ago, when Frame left Auckland and drifted back "to the is-land" - her South Island roots - Mrs Gordon followed and the sisters renewed their friendship.

"We all started off in Dunedin and one of our things was to come back, because it's such a wonderful place," Mrs Gordon said.

Frame was already fighting cancer in October as she fended off journalists asking her views on being nominated for the Nobel Prize in literature.

She was famously private, a trait which Mrs Gordon respected yesterday when asked for her sister's last words.

She simply repeated a three-month-old Frame joke about buying New Zealand's railways as an enormous train-set if she won the $2 million Nobel Prize.

The writer kept her humour until the end. One of the last emails she sent Auckland writer Carl Stead was a photograph of her lying in bed reading Stead's latest book review in the Listener.

It was a hospital bed, and Frame was hooked up to blood transfusion gear, but she looked "round-faced and pink - not like she was at death's door", according to Stead.

He believed Frame did not want to die. But she was satisfied with her long and productive life.

Her writing would be remembered for its "intense focus on language and how it worked, its subtleties and ambiguities".

Frame's literary skill was always a hallmark, but she was also noted for her psychological perception.

The American Academy of Arts and Letters spoke of "a series of extraordinary insights into suffering and thought".

Plaudits yesterday flowed for Frame.

Prime Minister Helen Clark said Frame would be mourned by lovers of literature throughout the world.

"She was a special person, a most engaging personality with a wickedly funny sense of humour and a generosity of spirit." Creative New Zealand chief Elizabeth Kerr spoke of a "rich legacy of exquisite and compelling writing" and said Frame's novels were "a journey into what it means to be human".

National Party leader Don Brash called her "a literary icon who overcame enormous odds" to break down misconceptions about mental illness.

Frame's biographer, Michael King, said 15 journalists rang him before lunchtime yesterday for his views on Frame.

He said the same sensitive qualities that led to Frame being wrongly diagnosed as having a mental illness lent power to her writing.

Janet Frame

28 August 1924 - 29 January 2004

Among her works:

The Lagoon and Other Stories (1951)

Owls Do Cry (1957)

Faces in the Water (1961)

Scented Gardens for the Blind (1963)

The Adaptable Man (1965)

To the Is-land (1982)

An Angel at My Table (1984)

The Envoy from Mirror City (1985)

The Carpathians (1988)