Background
Janet Frame was a New Zealand novelist, short story writer and poet.
In 1945, she entered Seacliff Mental Hospital, near Dunedin, where she was (wrongly) diagnosed as schizophrenic.
After her release, in 1956 she left New Zealand for Europe, travelling in the Mediterranean and living for seven years in London. Here, she wrote three novels and two collections of short stories.
Envoy to Mirror City is her third autobiography (in a series of 3) that chronicles her time away from New Zealand and final return to the town of her birth. It is during this time that specialists in London confirm her misdiagnosis and she learns to define herself after so many years defined by the mental and a society which looks to her to play a an appropriate feminine role. She mostly travels a solitary inner and outer path as she finds the meaning and direction in her writing.
“...out of a desire to be myself, not to follow the ever-dominant personalities around me, I had formed the habit of focusing in places not glanced at by others, of deliberately turning away from the main view...My memory of myself contains now myself looking outward and myself looking within from without, developing the view that others might have of me.” (Frame, 1984).
Relation to the Hermit
Frame spent much of her early life guided from outside herself and no appropriate feminine role models to fit the inordinately creative person she was. Her attempts to create an identity through more socially interactive means lead to the adoption of disastrous masquerades, principally the masquerade as the mad genius, the schizophrenic.
With misdiagnosis confirm she can no longer hold to this and must find her own way to her internal Mirror City, a place where writers are free to create. This process starts in London but much occurs in Ibiza the place I see most when she talks of Mirror City hence the background of the card. No snow covered mountain for this hermit but Ibiza in 1950s was a poor predominant Spanish speaking place giving her plenty of room for solitary exploration.
The 6-pointed star around her neck symbolises both the inner and outward direction. The inward hunt for Mirror City the outward production of telling works of fiction. The purple centre represents her battle to find a feminine expression that also served her creativity.
The candle, illuminates the page on her typewriter. The typewriter is her staff, the thing she leans on to open her inner awareness. It also signifies her role as guide and teacher as it is through her writing that she opens us to expansive new worlds.