It is also a vivid social document, capturing the language and texture of the postwar period. Owls Do Cry is a devastating reflection on the character of conventional society and the dangers that await those who reject its narrowness – and as such, is profoundly chilling. Karen Fergusson as a young Janet Frame in Jane Campion’s 1990 film, An Angel At My Table, based on Frame’s powerful autobiographical trilogy written to set the record straight about her private life While Daphne awaits her operation, she “sings” from “the dead room” in a brilliantly coloured stream of consciousness. The adult Daphne is condemned to undergo a leucotomy – a terrifying brain procedure aimed at ameliorating psychiatric conditions, and commonly carried out in the middle of the twentieth century, in spite of its well-recognised and devastating side-effects.

Specifically it dwells on Daphne Withers, whose journey from childhood to adulthood is also a journey into a state deemed insane. The novel focuses upon the four Withers children, who inhabit a world of the imagination as a means of refuge from the tragedies that dog their lives.

Owls Do Cry has now been reissued with a nuanced and appreciative introduction by Margaret Drabble, who calls the novel “an exhilarating and dazzling prelude to long and successful career.” The narrative covers 20 years in the life of the Withers family, who live on New Zealand’s South Island in a seaside town (“Their town, called Waimaru, was as small as the world and halfway between the South Pole and the Equator”) not unlike Frame’s native Oamaru. White, however, had read Owls Do Cry – and had mournfully told his American publisher that the book “makes me feel I have always been a couple of steps out from where I wanted to get in my own writing”. Ostensibly White and Frame could not have been more unalike: for while White’s reputation was already fully established (he would win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973), Frame’s writing was not always finding favour with the critics. Since the appearance in 1957 of her debut novel Owls Do Cry, Frame had published three more books, with a fifth in the works. The recipient of his note was the New Zealand writer Janet Frame, then living the life of an expatriate in London – and experiencing a startling blaze of creativity. In 1963, the august Australian novelist Patrick White wrote a fan letter.

Owls do cry by janet frame