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Available
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Publication
George Braziller (1982), Edition: First Edition, 195 pages
Description
The first part of Janet Frame's three-volume autobiography, this text chronicles her childhood and adolescence, spent in a materially poor but intellectually intense railway family in the 1920s and 1930s.
User reviews
LibraryThing member joucy
The author's life as a young child, daughter of a poor railway man, up to the time she leaves home to enter university.
LibraryThing member SeriousGrace
Janet Frame had written at least ten novels and a series of poetry over the course of her career before it seemed the natural next step to tell her autobiography. Her life story gave perspective to the fiction she had been writing for so many years. Why else does one assume his or her life story
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would be interesting to someone else, a complete stranger, if only to explain their actions or, in Frame's case, her craft? To the Is-Land starts when Frame is a very young child in Dunedin, New Zealand. She recounts the trials and tribulations of growing up poor and longing to fit in. She found solace in writing and at the the end of To the Is-Land a poet starts to emerge. Show Less
LibraryThing member starbox
This first volume of Janet Frame's autobiography takes her from infancy to setting out to teacher training college.
Born in 1924 in New Zealand, the author came from a relatively poor railway family; yet one which valued study and literature, with a mother who wrote poems, and a father who generally
And so the author pursued her high school career, her reading, and early attempts at getting her poems published in children's magazines. And yet while she and her sisters embark on stories and verse, their home life is traumatic at times with the death of one sister and the poorly understood epilepsy of her brother.
I thought Janet Frame's portrayal of childhood was very evocative as she describes the excitement of the adolescent discovering the possibilities of the world around them.
Born in 1924 in New Zealand, the author came from a relatively poor railway family; yet one which valued study and literature, with a mother who wrote poems, and a father who generally
Show More
encouraged his children's efforts.And so the author pursued her high school career, her reading, and early attempts at getting her poems published in children's magazines. And yet while she and her sisters embark on stories and verse, their home life is traumatic at times with the death of one sister and the poorly understood epilepsy of her brother.
I thought Janet Frame's portrayal of childhood was very evocative as she describes the excitement of the adolescent discovering the possibilities of the world around them.
Show Less
Subjects
Awards
Goodman Fielder Wattie Book Award (Winner — 1983)
Language
Original language
English
Physical description
195 p.; 8.75 inches
ISBN
0807610429 / 9780807610428