An Angel at My Table: The Complete Autobiography

by Janet Frame

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781619027886
Publisher:	Catapult
Publication date:	12/13/2016
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	592
Sales rank:	1,126,972
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

Janet Frame (1924 - 2004) was one of New Zealand's most distinguished writers. She is best known for An Angel at My Table, which the Sunday Times of London called "one of the great autobiographies written in the twentieth century," and inspired Jane Campion's internationally acclaimed film. Throughout her long career, Frame received a wide range of awards, including every literary prize for which she was eligible in New Zealand, honorary membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Literature.

Table of Contents

Volume 1 To the Is-Land 1

1 In the Second Place 5

1 In the Second Place 5

2 Toward the Is-Land 6

3 In Velvet Gown 11

4 The Railway People 16

5 Ferry Street, Wyndham 22

6 Hark, Hark, the Dogs Do Bark 31

7 Fifty-six Eden Street, Oamaru 37

8 Death and a Sickness 48

9 Poppy 55

10 O.K. Permanent Wave 63

11 The Prince of Sleep 67

12 Cures 72

13 The Birds of the Air 75

14 Pastimes 78

15 Gussy and the Invercargill March 86

16 The Athenaeum 93

17 Clothed in White Samite 96

18 Picnics 108

19 A Death 113

20 Once Paumanok 118

21 The Hungry Generations 128

22 The Kingdom by the Sea 131

23 Scrapers and Bluey 138

24 Faust and the Piano 142

25 Marking Time 147

26 Early Spring Snow 153

27 'That's Not You, Jasper' 163

28 University Entrance 168

29 Imagination 176

30 A Country Full of Rivers 179

31 Leaving the Is-Land, Greeting the Is-Land 187

Volume 2 An Angel at My Table 191

Part 1 Tricks of Desperation

1 The Stone 197

2 Number Four Garden Terrace, Dunedin 198

3 The Student 204

4 Again 'A Country Full of Rivers' 219

5 Isabel and the Growth of Cities 224

6 Willowglen 235

7 1945 (One) 241

8 1945 (Two) 249

9 1945 (Three) 254

10 1945 (Four) 257

11 The Boardinghouse and the New World 262

12 Willowglen Summer 272

13 Another Death by Water 276

14 Dear Educated 283

15 Threading Needles 292

lPart 2 Finding the Silk

16 Grand Hotel 305

17 Mr Brasch and Landfall 312

18 The Photograph and the Electric Blanket 319

19 Up North 323

20 Mr Sargeson and the Army Hut 329

21 Talk of Treasure 334

22 The Pine Trees in the Cool of the Evening 342

23 A Death 347

24 The Silkworms 354

25 Miss Lincoln, Beatrix Potter and Dr Donne 358

26 Advice to the Traveller 370

27 The Traveller 380

Volume 3 The Envoy From Mirror City 385

lPart 1 Triple Witness

1 Earthless, the Sailing 391

2 The Gentleman 397

3 Keats and the Storytellers of Battersea 407

4 Three 413

5 A Game of Chess 425

6 Plaza Roma 429

7 Calle Ignacio Riquer 433

8 Soap-New People 441

9 The Pine Trees 446

10 El Americano 452

11 Figuretti's 457

12 Andorra 471

lPart 2 At Home in the City

13 London 487

14 Questions 490

15 The Investigation and the Verdict 496

16 Dr Cawley and the Luxury of Time 508

17 Grove Hill Road and the Life of a Writer 512

18 Friends in London 523

19 Meeting the Publisher 531

20 A Cottage in the Country 536

21 An Apartment in the City 545

22 The Return 559

23 Willowglen 567

24 Only to Please the Envoy 577

Acknowledgments 581

Editorial Reviews

"One of the greatest autobiographies written in this century ." — Michael Holroyd

"Frame grasps an image and the emotion behind it in a few spare words." —Publishers Weekly

"[Frame] is endowed with a poet's imagination, and her prose has beauty, precision, a surging momentum, and the quality of constant surprise..."—The Atlantic

"She meditates upon the disrelation between inner and outer landscapes, mental and physical colors, cruelty and the withdrawal from cruelty, the experience of chaos, of inexplicable evils, of broken perceptions..." —The New York Times

From the Publisher