Janet Frame,far south modernist

Abstract

The essay offers a southern reading of “book-end” works by Janet Frame, her first novel, Owls Do Cry (1957), and her posthumous Towards Another Summer (2008), while also taking in her autobiographical account of her childhood in To the Is-Land (1982). The discussion will consider how she developed and honed techniques through which at once explicitly to locate herself in the antipodean space of the South Island, and to explore her identity as an Aotearoa New Zealand writer. These disruptive, exploratory techniques might be considered modernist, and hence as copied from metropolitan sources, but I further suggest that she intensively repurposed what she had borrowed, so launching innovative ways of seeing the far south that were explicitly grounded within the spatial and climactic coordinates of her home Island.

Up here at night there is a kind of super daylight, high in the sky, as if the dark were clinging closer to the earth under the whip and strike of the sun

(Frame, 2014: 173)

The land itself is only

smoke at anchor, drifting above

Antarctica’s white flower,

tied by a thin red line

(5000 miles) to Valparaiso.

“Zoetropes”

(Manhire, 2001: 132)

Introduction: Apprehending southern space

Whereas criticism on Janet Frame has often suggested that she used modernist techniques borrowed from European models to give poignant expression to her far southern world of South Island, Aotearoa New Zealand, this essay makes an alternative, appropriately counter-clockwise case. I suggest rather that Frame found ways of capturing that unique native environment in imagery and language that she developed dialogically in response to its special geography and climate — including such features as its astonishing ice-filtered light, and its quality of extreme remoteness, of being situated at the “far end” of the world. These techniques were, in other words, not simply derivative or borrowed from her reading of metropolitan writers like, say, James Joyce or T. S. Eliot, or even poets closer by, like Allen Curnow, though the early Frame was imitative. They were also experimental and self-initiated, drawn from her close observation of South Island weather and landscapes, and distinguished by unique qualities of “clarity, vividness” and “detailed observation” formed in dialogue with her surroundings, as modes of reflecting upon its particularities and haecceity (Stead, 2024: 3).

To borrow terms from the writer and critic Kirsty Gunn, Frame worked her way into the global modernist canon by writing freely and disruptively, often beyond genre, in ways that were also entirely true to the world that shaped her (Gunn, 2024: 5). What Patricia Neville has called her “intensely allusive, intertextual style” at one level situated her within “a world-wide community of writers” and gave her access to a network of intercultural cross-reference from which innovative techniques might be borrowed (2019: 11–12). Yet, at another level, that same cross-referential style allowed her to compose an only seemingly “borderless, boundless anywhere”, once again citing Gunn, that, I would want to add, is in fact closely bound up in the cyclical, diurnal shifts of the South Island’s skies and seascapes (2024: 5).

My reading therefore goes some way towards supporting the view that Frame’s work and perceptions were influenced by the identifiably modernist and mythic approach to New Zealand, and, especially, South Island, representation of critical nationalist poets like, most distinctively, Charles Brasch, and also Curnow. She drew on their self-consciously literary, citational poetic to shape local and regional landscapes and identities in her writing, and to achieve what John Newton calls “affective inhabitation” (2017). However, at the same time, I wish to go deeper, and weigh Frame’s work alongside other southern writers from around the hemisphere, as I do in the larger project that contextualises this one, Southern Imagining. I will tentatively suggest that Frame’s far southern identifications were so insightful and attuned because they were raw and experiential as well as allusive. They were in some profound way unmediated by these more literary infusions, and instead were brilliantly centred within the spatial and climactic coordinates of the Island environments she recalled so vividly from her childhood (Boehmer, 2025).

Like many other southern settler authors from the late nineteenth into the mid-twentieth century, including, early on, Olive Schreiner, Benito Lynch, Marcus Clarke, and Blanche Baughan, and even her compatriot, the restive, cosmopolitan Katherine Mansfield, Janet Frame often articulated an existential unease about how to apprehend southern spaces — in particular, their distance from everywhere else, including the institutions, schools, and art groupings where the most globally influential cultural forms were made. For all of these writers, whether Pākehā New Zealand, Australian, Chilean, Argentine, or southern African, farness from the rest of the world was a governing preoccupation. In large part, the concept of such farness is a northern projection — the idea that the south lies beyond (the north’s) space and time frames. However, it also entails the lived experience of global southerners who have to cope day by day with the geo-economic consequences of this projection. Frame is perhaps a leader among this loose, transnational grouping of southern writers, in the main for registering an intense desire to translate those feelings of distance and outsideness into her prose, to open to life forms that exceed northern determinations, and to embrace the South Island spaces that she called her own in and with her writing (Jensen, 2025). She also freely threaded literary prose and poetry from elsewhere, especially Anglophone traditions, through her home space. The image is intentional, bearing similarity to how she imagines flags of English literature weaving through her Island’s geography in To the Is-Land (1984: 207, 211). ¹

Growing up in an environment imbued with words and lines from her reading, and her mother’s verse and song, Frame insists on anchoring the literary reference points that were important to her, in her far southern world. At the same time, such as when she writes about her literary fantasy land of Ardenue, she places within it the native trees around Oamaru (1984: 243). She certainly shared with fellow settler poets and novelists in Aotearoa New Zealand a sense of cultural and literary dislocation — a “disturbing consciousness of inner disruption, paradox and contradiction”, as Angela Smith writes (2005: 143). But she also developed the capacity to make that southern space her own, precisely by writing its extremity and disruption — perhaps as (if not more) trenchantly as (than) any other twentieth-century southern settler writer we might care to mention. And she accomplished this in a way that was uniquely perceptive and mostly without cringe — by using her elastic, restlessly shifting sentences to confront and explore that sense of disturbance and paradox, as well as the feeling of being very far south that is bound up with it.

In the words of the poet Bill Manhire, of a later generation than the cultural nationalists Curnow and Brasch, and also from South Island, like Frame, an end-of-the-world feeling pervades writing from the region. (He is, even more precisely, from Southland, where the Frame family lived for a time when Janet was a child.) Growing up in Invercargill, New Zealand’s southernmost city, one of the departure-points for ships sailing “down” to the Antarctica continent, Manhire was always aware that “the next stop across the water is the ice”; that the South Pole was both proximate, and yet an alien territory (Manhire, 2011:40–42). And, indeed, if we look at any map of the Southern Hemisphere, or at the globe “upside down”, the relative proximity of Aotearoa New Zealand to Antarctica is matched only by Tierra del Fuego, that claw of South America reaching down to the Palmer Peninsula.

Frame shares in Manhire’s sense of the “tyranny of distance” that the South Island imposes. Uniquely, however, she is by and large content imaginatively to inhabit that distance, and was interested in charting its special medium, its cold steely light, using both the local and the cosmopolitan materials she had to hand (Rodríguez-Salas, 2016: 285). From her first novel Owls Do Cry (1957), through To the Is-Land (1982), and finally Towards Another Summer (2008), Frame recurringly depicts her native Island as a dream-like expanse tinged with snow light from the icy continent, “in the embrace of weather that existed of itself without reference to people or creatures and their everyday lives”— not unlike her own writing, the reader is tempted to add (1984: 22, 29, 66, 182–183). In Owls Do Cry, she expands further, drawing on South Island tropes of cold and ice, but also, interestingly, tapping into southern geospatial reference-points from around the hemisphere, such as we might find also in J. L. Borges or J. M. Coetzee:

Down in the south you feel all the time a kind of formidable background, like a block of grey shadow, of a continent of ice, Antarctica in the wings. The dark there is more frightening and less friendly, you are trapped in it as in a tomb, and the stone of ice will not roll away. (2014: 173)

As we discern from the sense of entrapment and oppression she calls up in this passage, Frame found ways to mould her descriptive language no matter how overtly modernist, to communicate her feelings of in-dwelling or inhabitation within southern distance despite how forbidding and hostile it felt to her. With her imaginative compass points centred within the South Island, as she more than once admitted, even the North Island seemed to her for many years exotic and faraway. In this, she might be accused of holding a parochial view of her Island’s cultural difference, as against the North Island’s closer associations with Māori culture and wider Pacific identities. But, again, how she communicates her perception of hereness in this south — “you are trapped in it as in a tomb”— goes some way to refuting such a charge. She is preoccupied with the sense of haecceity — “the dark there”— and how to convey it. This writing does not merely present us with a case of “critical nationalism […] repeat[ing] colonial patterns it otherwise condemns”, as Alex Calder writes (1998: 173). Instead, or at the same time, Frame is striving to acknowledge yet also strip away myth — whether local myths of the South Island, or European concepts of faraway-ness — to get through to a core reality of the south that she understood as lying always somewhere just out of reach.

A related sense of belonging to the South Island’s “grey shadow”, is captured in another notable early passage in Owls Do Cry, which is significant for how the narrative eye explicitly locates itself south, or here (not out there), “halfway between the South Pole and the equator”:

Their town, called Waimaru, was small as the world and halfway between the South Pole and the equator, that is, forty-five degrees exactly. There was a stone monument just north of the town to mark the spot in gold lettering.

—Traveller, the writing said, Stop here. You are now standing halfway between the South Pole and the equator.

What did it feel like to be standing at forty-five degrees?

It felt no different. (2014: 20)

“At forty-five degrees” (emphasis added): it would be difficult to find a more explicit latitudinal coordinate in any other southern writer of Frame’s generation, or earlier. Or to encounter a more comically matter-of-fact and deadpan connection with it. Significantly, too, the many references to books and places scattered across this first novel — including to hymns, the Bible, English poetry, and Shakespeare — are all placed relative to this precise southern reference point. For example, the protagonist Daphne imagines the mountain from which Jesus ascends as a “Southern Alp” (2014: 33). And Ariel’s song from The Tempest which gives the novel its title, sung by Daphne’s elder sister Francie in a school production, is threaded into a chain of association with the native owl, the morepork / ruru, crying in the “macrocarpa and cabbage trees” (29).

So close was Frame’s embrace of her espoused remote region of the hemisphere — and the planet — that she would later link her life-long sense of existential aloneness to its far southern isolation and, more specifically again, to the experience of having been brought up there: “I have got to learn that I am alone for ever […] I will never have anybody close to me. The rest of the world is miles away over desert and snowfield and sea” (King, 2000: 94). Or, in Faces in the Water, referring to her experiences of confinement in mental health institutions, Frame’s narrator reports that “a great gap [had] opened in the ice floe between myself and the other people” (2000: 94, 96). These are heartrending expressions of extreme isolation, but they are also notable once again for their haecceity, their assertions of speaking from here, in the far south. The feeling of southern isolation comes through strongly, too, in the island metaphors that pervade Frame’s work, with the word island memorably seen, heard, and repeatedly asserted as is-land, the silent “s” pronounced, as she had said it as a child. Her rendition is of course prominently captured in the title To the Is-Land with its hyphenated i-word (1984: 17, 59, 207).

Frame’s modernism and the far southern world

Janet Frame is not alone among settler writers, earlier and later, in being interested in opening her craft to avant garde modernist approaches that, while they might at first sight appear faithfully imitative, offered a writer in her position stylistic tools with which to test out new representative codes and investigate fresh and lesser-known levels of perception and expression. For her, as for other southern writers of the first and middle thirds of the twentieth century, these seemingly borrowed techniques became creative tools with which to explore geo-imaginative dispositions that lay outside the domains that had to date been addressed in literary writing in English. Therefore, though she arguably first learned stream of consciousness techniques and imagiste devices from her reading of Virginia Woolf or James Joyce, she noticeably developed, honed, and refracted these in order to work out ways of rendering into prose the particularities of her southern world. Otherwise put, she used modernist techniques to embrace certain tenets of critical nationalism — techniques that in the hands of a less experimental writer might have led to the conflicted disavowal of such community (Newton, 2017; Dean, 2020: 8–24). Not so for Frame. Rather, she championed locale by drawing on both Curnow and Joyce.

It is now a critical truism that the early to mid-twentieth-century modernist questioning of authority and tradition often correlated with settler writers’ experiences of writing from the margins, “doubly or triply alienated from origins” (Boehmer, 2005: 117–118). The writers’ interest in how to report on their displaced, upended worlds, and what it was to live in such spaces, they found, corresponded to the fragmentary, incomplete, and prismatic aspects of modernist art that were on display, for example, in Cubist painting or the music of Strindberg. These correlations and correspondences richly justify the treatment of early to mid-twentieth-century modernism within a globally expanded panorama impacted by colonial forces, or, as I have written elsewhere, as “animated by, and shaped within, inter- and transnational arenas” (Boehmer and Matthews, 2011: 284). This is the arena within which I would wish to place Frame, albeit towards its outer edge. It certainly is the case that, for Frame, the experimentation of writers like Lawrence, Joyce, and Woolf with capturing in narrative the flow of thought and the play of emotion, resonated profoundly with her efforts to recreate the experience of growing up in the tightly woven, introverted familial nest that was Eden Street. Yet, at the same time, I wish to add, the strange, forbidding roar of the Southern Ocean beyond the Oamaru foreshore pushed her, at certain key moments in her writing, to recognize the limits and extreme edginess of this world, that it lay beyond even the generative dissonances that a modernist style or mode made possible. In short, she took from her reading of the European modernist authors a vocabulary of self-alienation and defamiliarization, but she also adapted this to amplify the raw emotions of lostness and remoteness that to her typified the cold, distant places where she grew up.

In this experimentation she was not alone, however. While New Zealand novelists and poets of an earlier generation to Frame’s subscribed to “a strong (if not overwhelming) sense of community” with “an overarching British tradition”, in the influential words of Allen Curnow, they were at the same time concerned accurately to represent and comprehend their southern location, and, in many cases, its precise regional coordinates (Anderson, 1991; Curnow, 1987: xx; Turner, 1994). Cultural movements sparked within theatre groups, little magazines, and university departments, emphasized identity and originality, while invented traditions and community customs helped to combat feelings of exile and “nowhere-ness” (Carter, 2006: 10–11, 37; Hilliard, 2016: 138–150). In many ways, therefore, the new settler nation came to present as compelling a means as modernism through which to express a modern cultural identity, yet one that was not in competition with Eliotesque fragmentation but complementary to it. These cultural nationalist endeavours were not separate from avant-gardism but rather tied to it in complicated ways. W. B. Yeats’s creative debt to the Irish cultural revival at the end of the nineteenth century, as well as to Ezra Pound, offers a very different but prominent example (Kiberd, 1997).

Where the self-consciously modern and yet passionately New Zealand-focussed Frame perhaps differs most obviously from her fellow countrymen of a slightly earlier generation is in the degree of her assertion of singularity, as well as in the vividness of her perceptions of southness itself. True, other settler writers had found importance in locating and transforming into words local, specific, and sometimes indigenous detail, the surrounding “flickers of […] nativeness”, in critic Philip Mead’s words; “the essentials of tree and shrub”, in Australian novelist Patrick White’s (2005: 210). The turn-of-the-century New Zealand poet William Pember Reeves (a favourite of Frame’s mother) indicatively described his “lonely” island homeland as both “drear” and “a citadel free”, washed by the “earth-girdling” Southern Ocean (Pember Reeves, 1898: 1–3). As if in response to such perceptions, Curnow, in his influential introduction to A Book of New Zealand Verse (1945), duly defines national reality as something most intensely realized and “special” “where we pick up the traces” (Curnow, 1987).

Yet, for Frame, it was not necessary to search for and pick up those traces with anything like Curnow’s anxious assiduity. As a writer, she dwelt more comfortably within the local (and not always indigenous) essentials of tree, scrub — and gorse. Her full-hearted acceptance of her South Island coordinates freed her from fretful preoccupations with questions of New Zealand or even antipodean literary identity, differently from many of her mid-century peers. At the same time, she found in her concentrated reading of the poets James Baxter, Charles Brasch, and Curnow, as well as the writer Frank Sargeson who became her mentor, “a fact of belonging” that, as she said, “overwhelmed me” (King, 2000: 79–80). Their testing of a New Zealand poetic voice, it seems, deepened and strengthened her ability to address and write of her own place. Thus, even as she projected herself into certain personae, in a characteristically modernist way, she also placed these within distinct, fully realized New Zealand worlds — worlds that were also recognizably far south (Dean, 2021: 88, 102–103).

Frame’s gender no doubt goes some considerable way to explaining how it is that she reconciled and balanced modernist aesthetic vocabularies and a language of New Zealand belonging with a lightness and yet a conviction that lay out of the range of many of her male counterparts. As a rule, colonial or settler women writers were often excluded from, and hence less invested in, national projects. Indeed, if anything, settler literary groupings including the self-consciously modern and avant-garde, outdid their metropolitan counterparts in their fraternal exclusivity. Michele Leggott in her work traces a “lost matrix of women poets” of early twentieth-century New Zealand, including Jessie Mackay, Eileen Duggan, and Robin Hyde — writers whose culturally committed but also “politically alert, humanitarian enterprise” demands re-evaluation both within and against a national genealogy (Leggott, 1995: 266–293). However, for women writers across the former empire there were compensations to this exclusion. Closed out of the male worlds of bush and veld, unless as symbols, they were freer to explore other cultural idioms. Frame certainly availed herself of her outsider position relative to the earlier generation of dominant, critical nationalist male voices. As in her adoption of a modernist style at the start of Owls Do Cry, she took pleasure in exploring other modes of imaginative orientation, including the complicated fractals of transnational influence and interrelationship. So, too, though in different ways, did Hyde and Mansfield (or, in the neighbouring context of Australia, Miles Franklin, Henry Handel Richardson, and Christina Stead).

It is interesting to speculate that Frame may have picked up from her reading of Hyde the godwit motif otherwise mostly associated with Charles Brasch’s much-anthologized poem “The Islands (2)” about these departing migratory birds. It was Hyde who had first found in birds like the golden plover and, especially, the godwit, an analogy for Pākehā ceaseless yearning north to Europe, as well as their psychic journeys homing back south, the latter direction in particular appealing to the homesick Frame when feeling stranded in wintry London (Hyde, 2001: xxxiii–xxxiv, xxxiii; 1989: 139). ² The godwit enters Towards Another Summer as an emblem of the equinoctial inclination towards the other hemisphere that comes to many southerners in the north when the seasons change in October, and does so through the medium of Brasch’s poem with its haunting images of departure, murmuration, and the waiting sea (Brasch, 1948). Yet Hyde’s evocations of the godwit unmistakeably hover behind Brasch’s — a male writer here unusually serving as a conduit between two women. The triangular interrelationship not only represents a suggestive reversal of twentieth-century settler writer trends. It also offers a further confirmation of Frame’s ceaseless longing for her distant southern world, as we will see again.

Writing southern worlds in Owls Do Cry and To the Is-Land

These distinctive, interwoven tendencies, to modernist experimentation and to a national concern with authentically representing one’s home space, are both evident in Frame’s writing from the opening pages of her first novel Owls Do Cry. Yet, as evident, too, is her constant straining away from both of these variously northern, metropolitan, and restrictive trends, and towards the local and particular.

A thinly disguised autobiographical novel, divided into two parts, Owls Do Cry begins Frame’s life’s work of mapping the rest of the world from the Oamaru shore (Waimaru in the novel). The first part of the story of the Withers family — Bob and Amy, and their children Francie, Toby, Daphne (the Frame surrogate), and Chicks — charts the children’s growing up and Francie’s death by a freak burning accident. The second, set “twenty years later”, tells of Daphne’s incarceration in a mental institution, during which period the mother, Amy, dies. Yet, throughout, no matter whether the setting is the children’s favourite playground — the local rubbish dump with its many shiny and bookish treasures — or the confinement of the mental institution, the rest of the world is understood relative to the “exact” southern coordinate of Waimaru, at forty-five degrees. Frustrated and miserable though they may be, the characters are represented as anchored in place.

The resonances of James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1914) are palpable from the first line of the short one-page preface chapter to Owls Do Cry, as in: “The day is early with birds beginning and the wren in a cloud piping like the child in the poem, drop thy pipe, thy happy pipe” (2014: 7–8). This opening onto the sensory world of a young person, filtered through their first pristine perceptions, counterpoints the opening lines of Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist closely, as if deliberately to set this marginal southern künstlerroman against one of its northern, metropolitan models. The stream of images issues from Daphne in the “dead room” of the asylum, remembering back to the beginning of a summer’s day in the much-missed Eden Street garden. This “gold place” is dense with sprouting, flowering plants and “pea-green lush of grass”, yet also shadowed by “time and death”. The carrot seeds Daphne remembers planting do not thrive, and summer descends into a grotesque, even sinister scene of a cold (presumably northern) Christmas presided over by “voluminous, dyspeptic Santa Claus” (perhaps a figure invited to entertain the asylum inmates) (2014: 7–12). At the close, the seasonal gift tied up in “the obituary of string” is a caterpillar “that is wound up and crawls with rippling back across our day and night”— and perhaps across both summer and winter seasons as well (2014: 7–8).

The marked-out, italicized moments when the mature Daphne remembers back from the “dead room” recur across the novel, repeatedly shadowing the action with her horror at the loss and damage inflicted by the passing of time. Yet, at the level of craft, the italicization also highlights the degree of literary experimentation Frame wishes to demonstrate to the reader, and exhibits the extent of her intertextual referencing. In this first section alone, there are echoes of William Blake (“thy happy pipe”), W. B. Yeats (the growing “bean flower”), Eliot (“wrap our life in cellophane”), Dylan Thomas (the surfeit of green growing things), American poetry, most prominently e. e. cummings (the self-consciously naïve phrasing), as well as Joyce. To take only this evidence, Frame appears keen to position herself within a high-modernist and hence recognizably northern genealogy of influence.

Yet there is at the same time something perfunctory about this showy referentiality, this diligent ticking of precursor boxes. Sure enough, within only a few pages of the opening stream of consciousness, the Withers family story properly gets going, and the elaborate literary citation lapses away. The narrative eye shifts to the children’s departure for school and thence to the town rubbish dump “amongst the paper and steel and iron and rust and old boots and everything that the people of the town had cast out as of no use” (11). In the second chapter, we find another brief instance of italicized word play in which the children mix up colander and calendar, but the references here are already more local and familiar, drawing in homemade cabbage water, a grandmother’s artificial legs, and the children’s wriggling toes (9–10). The scene is set for their discovery of silver paper and fairy-tale books in and around the dump — a space surrounded by firtrees that speak their own name, “firr – firr – firr”. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the echoey modernist frame, therefore, is, paradoxically, how relatively soon it shrinks. The literary reference points transferred from elsewhere become a means for Frame to move on swiftly to prismatic reflections on all that is here, now, and immediate, including references to “Maori wars” and colonial landgrab. Even (or especially) in this far south land of New Zealand, the north signifies progress, and the south means “stagnation” (21). But this south is also more intensely realized and up close than anywhere else — “furious”, “mountainous”, “dizzying” (23).

The far southern inclination of Frame’s writing is confirmed and expanded in the later autobiography of her childhood, To the Is-Land, the first volume in the trilogy An Angel at my Table (1982-85, 1989). Here the “Is-Land” of the South Island, “her kingdom by the sea”, Janet clarifies, equates to life itself (1984: 185). It is also tinged and “burdened” with the great lonely expanses of the farthest south that stretch out beyond the southernmost region of Southland where the Frame family lives for a period of time when she is very young. In this space, the Aurora Australis frequently colours the night sky, and, by day, the heavens are “lit” by “snow light reflected from Antarctica, or, as [Janet] knew it, from Mother’s constant reference, ‘the South Pole, kiddies’” (22, 24, 27, 29).

As in Owls Do Cry, the To the Is-Land narrative is once again syncopated with retrospection. At moments of change and new maturity, the protagonist Jean or Janet stands at the top of a nearby hill and looks out at her “familiar kingdom”, “listening to the waves crashing over the breakwater”, marking the sites that shape her family’s lives — the woollen mills, the morgue (1984: 185, 207, 232). Her sightlines recall the layout and foreshore of the fictional Waimaru in Owls: on the one hand lies the wild “roll-down sea” with its dangerous undertow, and, on the other, within the breakwater, Friendly Bay, a “little shovel-scoop” of sand. The threat of the great roaring sea “so near” will again surface in Towards Another Summer (as do many other images from To the Is-Land), bringing into the novel visions of the land (a land) “swallowed by waves” (154).

As before, literature from other worlds appears to arrive naturally in Oamaru, flowing “like an array of beautiful ribbons through the branches of a green, growing tree” (211). The child Frame transplants flora from across New Zealand and the world into her fantasy land Ardenue, giving substance and certainty to “a new inner ‘My Place’” (207, 211, 243). In a particularly striking scene, when a teacher reads from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ballad epic “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, Janet feels confirmed in her own special geography, “feeling the nearness of a seascape that was part of Oamaru” (182–183). Coleridge’s poem of the far south with its icy seascapes and terrible storms, seems to thrust upon her an “inescapable dream” that is at the same time a fundamental reality — “a ‘pure’ dream of that time on the sea in the embrace of weather that existed of itself without reference to people or creatures and their everyday lives” (183). She arrives here through the literary, but that here also exists of itself, without reference to other things.

Yearning: Towards Another Summer

Towards Another Summer, Frame’s last novel, unpublished in her lifetime, counterparts with Owls Do Cry not only chronologically, as last against first, but also thematically. Whereas that looked out at the world from Oamaru, this is set in London, yet is redolent of the magnetic pull of the far south. From the opening pages, the narrative yearns back along the same curving track from the British capital across the Indian Ocean to Aotearoa (or, land of the long white cloud), that is traced in Bill Manhire’s “Zoetropes”, cited in the epigraph. Frame’s writing is tangibly stirred by the Coriolis forces that it itself ponders — those still little understood instincts that steer migrating birds, here, in particular, the godwit. The lines from Brasch’s haunting poem echo through the narrative alongside other iconic New Zealand poems. While the two novels are in this sense cantilevered, one set north, the other south, in both the south is the pivot around which the imagined world turns.

The action of the novel is minimal — which has the effect of accentuating its compulsion to the south. In the depths of an English winter, a New Zealand novelist Grace Cleave who is trying to make her way in London, yet missing “her country”, is invited to spend the weekend with the literary magazine editor Philip Thirkettle and his family in his home outside London. The temperature in the fictional Relham is said to be “a degree warmer” than in the capital. The distress that the time spent with other people provokes, and the memories triggered by the New Zealand books and images Grace finds in their home, prompts her in the second half of the novel to retreat early to her London flat and write “the story of the weekend”. While pondering her homesickness — that way in which the “Southern Cross cuts through my heart instead of through the sky”— she comes to realize that her lonely state is ultimately easier to bear than company, but also that her displacement has somehow denatured her: “Here I live in a perpetual other season unable to read in the sky, the sun, the temperature, the signs for returning” (2008: 7, 9–10, 18–19, 55–59). The “mist” in her mind has changed her into a “migratory bird”. Coriolis forces created by the earth’s spin, irresistibly urge her south, as does the New Zealand poetry running through her thoughts, directing them towards the Pacific. Her yearned-for, unidirectional migratory track strikes a line through the round of circular pathways that have taken her to and from London in order to make her way as a writer.

Imagining herself as a bird or a capsule projected south, releases in Grace an extraordinary series of reflections on “true identity”, belonging, and gravitation that runs across the rest of Towards Another Summer. She rediscovers at one and the same time both where she really belongs — “my place swallowed me like a shadow”— and the bafflement and distress of having left it behind: “How can I ever contain within me so much of one land?” The question recurs across the rest of the novel, with increasing force, as the build-up of topographical common nouns outlining the New Zealand landscape in the following emphatically relays: “How had she ever been able to exchange the sun, the beach, the shimmering tent of light, the dramatic landscape, mountains, rivers, gullies, glaciers, for [this] brick bleeding wound?” (2008: 56, 58, 103). The grim city landscape that surrounds her is overtopped with searing memories of light, and heart-stopping feelings of alienation here and belonging there.

Conclusion

Janet Frame’s work counterparts other unorthodox and experimental writers of the far south, such as the earlier, nineteenth-century Olive Schreiner or the later, twenty-first century Alexis Wright or Eleanor Catton, and forcefully reshapes what it is to write southern worlds with northern tools — words, techniques, and genres. Reading her work, we have no doubt that the far south is her existential reference point; the South Island the centre of her world (2024: 5). Yet she recreates that world in vivid detail not so much by moving towards realism or even embracing a South Island mythography, but by eventually departing from both, as we find in the alternation between vivid natural imagery and the repeated bursts of stream of consciousness in Owls Do Cry. While Frame’s novels strive better to understand the make-up of a higher reality that she sometimes saw as the imagination, and sometimes “the manifold”, a term she took from Immanuel Kant, that fundamental idealized reality also always bore far southern coordinates and contours. The manifold held out for her a “terrible everlasting substantiality”, as she explores in explicit terms in the later novel, Living in the Maniototo (1979) (King, 2001: 422; Dean, 2021: 102). But that the physical correlate for the manifold is evidently the South Island with its snow light, means that her imagination, too, throughout, was relentlessly south-directed, as it so evidently is in her first and last published works.

For Janet Frame, the manifold of the imagination is replete with southern place. Its complexities allow her to see distance and closeness as conflated or intersecting, the land possessing the writer even as her writing imaginatively recreates the land. To borrow closing terms from another of her novels, The Carpathians (1988), the last published in her lifetime, her home island was her “gravity star”. Significantly, looking out at the world in reference to this star meant that galaxies very faraway in the night sky could also seem, through a kind of diffraction, very bright and intensely close (King, 2001: 487).