To the Is-Land was published by George Braziller in 1982 (simultaneously published in New Zealand by Women’s Press), the first volume of Frame’s three-part autobiography that would also include An Angel at My Table (1984) and The Envoy from Mirror City (1985). The title comes from Frame’s childhood misunderstanding of the word “island” — she heard it as “is-land,” a place of pure being — and this productive mishearing establishes the book’s method: language is not a transparent medium for communicating experience but a generative force that creates the reality it appears merely to describe.
The memoir covers Frame’s childhood in Oamaru, a small town on the east coast of New Zealand’s South Island. The family is large, poor, and turbulent: the father works for the railway, the mother writes poetry in secret, the children navigate the complexities of poverty with varying success. Frame renders childhood consciousness with an accuracy that avoids both nostalgia and retrospective wisdom — the child’s perceptions are recorded without the adult’s commentary.
Two drowning deaths — Frame’s sisters Myrtle and Isabel, who drowned in separate incidents — cast a shadow across the autobiography that Frame refuses to exploit melodramatically. She records the deaths and their aftermath with the same precise attention she gives to everything else, refusing to elevate them into the defining events of her childhood even as their presence haunts every page.
Jane Campion’s 1990 film An Angel at My Table (covering all three volumes) introduced Frame’s autobiography to an international audience and revived interest in her fiction.
Collecting To the Is-Land
First edition (George Braziller, New York, 1982): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First US edition: $30–$80
- First New Zealand edition (Women’s Press, 1982): $60–$150
- Complete autobiography set (3 volumes): $100–$250