Abstract
A thorough examination of Jay to Bee: Janet Frame’s Letters to William Theophilus Brown (2016), which provides a selection of Janet Frame’s letters to her American painter friend Bill Brown, confirms her propensity for viewing her own life-writing primarily as an instrument of fictionalization. Frame’s letters should then not be considered as a mere textual adjunct documenting a period in her life or a phase in her poetics. By dint of actually inventing, or imaginatively adding to, the story of her friendship with Brown, she constructed a complex corpus which proves formally and thematically consistent with the novels of her middle to late period. This is where she first explored intuited links between the arts of painting and fiction, which would lead to the enhanced metafictional self-consciousness characteristic of her latest novels.
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