CLUTHA, Janet Paterson Frame 1924-2004
(Janet Frame)

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born August 28, 1924, in Dunedin, New Zealand; died of leukemia January 29, 2004, in Dunedin, New Zealand. Author. Misdiagnosed as a schizophrenic, Clutha, who was better known as Janet Frame, the name under which she wrote, published award-winning novels, stories, and poems, many of which drew on her own tormented life and featured characters who found it difficult to communicate with other people. The daughter of a railroad worker, she grew up deprived of a nurturing environment in a life punctuated by the horrifying tragedy of having two sisters drown. As a result, she developed into a painfully shy person. Although she loved literature and dreamed of being a poet, Clutha enrolled at Dunedin Teachers' College, but she could not finish her degree because of her fear of being evaluated by her instructors during a performance review. The experience left her so upset that she attempted suicide. Recovering somewhat from this, Clutha next attended the University of Otaga. However, when she wrote about her suicide attempt as part of a psychology course paper, school administrators feared she was mentally ill and had her sent to a hospital. She was diagnosed, incorrectly, as having schizophrenia, and for the next eight years Clutha suffered through hundreds of electroshock treatments. Despite this, she spent much of her eight years in the hospital writing, and even won a literary award in 1951 for The Lagoon: Stories. It was this award that saved her, because one of the doctors who found out about the prize released her from the hospital just before she was scheduled to be lobotomized. Gaining the attention of fellow writer Frank Sargenson, she found sanctuary under his aegis. Sargenson set up a home for her in a small building on his property, where she could write. A government grant in 1956 allowed her to travel to England and Spain for the next several years, and she returned to New Zealand in 1963. By this time, Clutha had built a reputation as an author, winning the New Zealand Literary Fund Award in 1960 for Owls Do Cry (1957), and a New Zealand Scholarship in Letters in 1964. An evaluation of her health by doctors at the Maudsley Hospital Institute of Psychiatry around this time also concluded she had never been a schizophrenic; ironically, Clutha, who legally changed her name from Frame in 1973 to that of a river in her old home in Oamaru, New Zealand, resented the diagnosis because she no longer had a convenient excuse for her reclusiveness. Becoming one of the most respected writers in New Zealand, she wrote productively through the 1980s, including such novels as The Edge of the Alphabet (1962), Intensive Care (1970), and The Carpathians (1988), which won the Commonwealth Writers Prize in 1989; she was also well known for her three autobiographies: To the Is-Land (1983, An Angel at My Table (1984), and The Envoy from Mirror City (1985), which together were adapted into the 1990 film An Angel at My Table. In addition to her novels, she wrote the children's book Mona Minim and the Smell of the Sun (1969), story collections such as The Reservoir and Other Stories (1966) and You Are Now Entering the Human Heart (1983), and the poetry collection The Pocket Mirror (1967). After suffering two mild strokes in the 1990s, Clutha wrote less, but still found considerable solace in the exercise of writing during her remaining years. For her literary accomplishments, she was named a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1983.

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

BOOKS

Contemporary Novelists, seventh edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 2001.

PERIODICALS

Independent (London, England), January 30, 2004, p. 22.

Los Angeles Times, January 31, 2004, p. B23.

New York Times, January 30, 2004, p. A19.

Times (London, England), January 30, 2004.

Washington Post, January 30, 2004, p. B8.