Francisco Miralles

In December 1952 a young New Zealand writer was days away from a lobotomy, with her mother's signature already on the consent form. The operation was cancelled only because the hospital superintendent happened to read in his newspaper that her first book had won the country's top literary prize. She had never had the illness they were treating. Janet Frame was a shy, red-haired teacher's college student from a poor railway family in Otago. In 1945, at 21, she had a breakdown, and within weeks she was committed to Seacliff Mental Hospital outside Dunedin and diagnosed with schizophrenia. She looked the condition up in a textbook and found it described as a slow, incurable deterioration of the mind. She spent most of the next eight years being proved right by the people treating her. Over those years she was given more than 200 rounds of electroconvulsive therapy, unmodified, with no anaesthetic and no muscle relaxant. She said later that it shredded her memory. In between she wrote. A friend gathered her stories and got them published in 1951, as The Lagoon, while she was still a patient. By late 1952 the doctors had decided the next step was a prefrontal leucotomy, cutting the connections at the front of her brain to make her calmer. Her mother, told it was for the best, signed. Janet counted down the days. Then the superintendent, Dr Geoffrey Blake-Palmer, came onto the ward holding a newspaper. The Lagoon had won the Hubert Church Memorial Award. He told her he had decided she should stay as she was. The operation was cancelled. In 1957, at the Maudsley Hospital in London, a team of psychiatrists examined her properly and told her she had never had schizophrenia. They said she should never have been put in a mental hospital at all, and that most of what was wrong with her by then had been caused by her time on the wards. She went on to become New Zealand's greatest novelist. Her autobiography became An Angel at My Table, Jane Campion's film. She received the Order of New Zealand, the country's highest honour, and was talked about for the Nobel Prize. She died in 2004, at 79, with her mind intact. The women in the beds around her at Seacliff had no book in the newspaper.