At the same time, the story is clearly meant to make fun of the narrow standards that often determine the lives of small-town people striving for economical and social rise. Several passages mirror the confusion of the mind that is so difficult to understand for the outsider and often condemns the afflicted to a life on the margins of society, if not locked away from the public in a mental institution.

It goes without saying, that someone with Janet Frame’s background didn’t produce just a novel like any other. The novels Towards Another Summer (2007) and In the Memorial Room (2013) first appeared posthumously.Īlthough written in third-person, Owls Do Cry is a very personal, not to say semi-autobiographical novel that carries the reader off into childhood with its many ups and downs as the different members of a poor family, notably the author’s literary alter ego Daphne, experience it. Jane Frame died in Dunedin, New Zealand, in January 2004. Others of her most notable works are Faces in the Water (1961), Scented Gardens for the Blind (1963), The Adaptable Man (1965), Intensive Care (1970), Daughter Buffalo (1972), Living in the Maniototo (1979) and three autobiographical volumes titled To the Is-Land (1982), An Angel at My Table (1984), and The Envoy From Mirror City (1984) now published in one volume as An Angel at My Table. She made her literary debut in 1951 with the award-winning short story collection The Lagoon and Other Stories followed six years later, in 1957, by her first novel Owls Do Cry. The following eight years saw her in and out of psychiatric wards and hospitals in different parts of New Zealand being – falsely – diagnosed with schizophrenia which didn’t prevent her from writing, though. As from 1943 she studied at Dunedin College of Education to become a teacher, but suffered a breakdown during the year of practical placement in a school. Janet Frame was born Nene Janet Paterson Clutha in Dunedin, New Zealand, in August 1924.

Owls do cry