num_pages: 191
description: In this first volume of her autobiography, New Zealand novelist Janet Frame tells of her childhood as the daughter of an impoverished railway worker and a mother who aspired to publish poetry.Despite material privations and family conflicts, the world of the imagination was accorded a supreme place in the Frame household, and it was at this time that Janet Frame acquired her lifelong love for Romantic poetry and her tactile sense of the power of words.Amongst evocations of New Zealand landscape and the recall of childhood perceptions, we learn of the tragic death by drowning of her sister Myrtle, her brother's epilepsy - and begin to feel the dark undercurrents that were to suck Janet Frame under in the years before she found herself as a writer.
language: English
title: To the Is-Land
titlecomplete: To the Is-Land (Autobiography, #1)
genres: Historical, 20th Century, Autobiography, Memoir, Biography, Mental Illness, Own, Mental Health, Biography Memoir, Nonfiction
ratings_count: 728
series: Janet Frame Autobiography
awards: awardedAt: 410256000000
name: Ockham New Zealand Book Awards
category: (Goodman Fielder Wattie)