the Girl in My Garden': Frank Sargeson, William Plomer and Janet Frame (Essay‪)‬

In the second of his autobiographical volumes, More Than Enough (1975), Frank Sargeson provides the barest outline of the period when Janet Frame, then virtually unknown, occupied an old army hut in the garden of his ramshackle home in Takapuna, Auckland. In a fashion that is typical of his intense reticence in these volumes, he gives no reason for not telling the full story, merely saying that it is for Frame to tell 'if she chooses': Frame herself has added substantially to this account in her second volume of autobiography, An Angel At My Table. (2) In a chapter entitled 'Mr. Sargeson and the Army Hut', she tells how Sargeson sought her out and invited her to move into his hut, arranged for her a medical benefit income of three pounds a week, and encouraged her to write. As she does throughout her autobiographies, she downplays the extent to which she was mentally disturbed at this time, saying merely that her years in mental hospitals had left her shy and intimidated: