Janet and Jason

• To the Is-Land: An Autobiography by Janet Frame
  Women’s Press, 253 pp, £4.95, April 1984, ISBN 0 7043 3904 8
• An Angel at My Table. An Autobiography: Vol. II by Janet Frame
  Women’s Press, 195 pp, £7.95, October 1984, ISBN 0 7043 2844 5
• The Envoy from Mirror City. An Autobiography: Vol. III by Janet Frame
  Women’s Press, 176 pp, £8.95, November 1985, ISBN 0 7043 2875 5
• You are now entering the human heart by Janet Frame
  Women’s Press, 203 pp, £7.95, October 1985, ISBN 0 7043 2849 6
• Conversation in a Train by Frank Sargeson
  Oxford, 220 pp, £14.00, February 1985, ISBN 0 19 648023 X

Few writers can claim to have quite literally saved their own lives through writing. In the second volume of her autobiography, Janet Frame describes how she was rescued from the leucotomy then fashionable in New Zealand mental hospitals by attracting the attention of the superintendent. Her first volume of short stories, The Lagoon, had won the Hubert Church Award, the first of many literary prizes which she was to receive in her climb to an international reputation (one, it should be said, which has always flourished in the USA rather than England). Some ten novels and four other volumes of poems and stories later, she is at 60 close to being the grand old woman of New Zealand literature.