A year ago, as Ed moved to the "normal ward" after three weeks in intensive care, Madeleine returned to the author she was reading before his illness. While he rested, she pushed a bench against the wall for support and revisited Janet Frame. Since Ed's recovery, we’ve kept an eye out in our shop stalls for authors she was reading.

This collection reflects that process of returning—beginning with familiar names and moving towards new discoveries in poetry, fiction, and philosophy. It’s also a journey back to a time when the poetic tradition held more influence, echoing her mother’s belief that “The poets know.”

Janet Frame began her reading journey with Grimm’s Fairy Tales and School Journals. Her mother introduced her to Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, and the American poets. Her father won a collection of Oscar Wilde at an auction, and her brother found Ernest Dowson in a rubbish dumpster.

In the town library, she explored Victorian novelists, German philosophers, and poets, finding inspiration in writers like Jane Austen, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, and Thomas Hardy. Her beloved heroines included Anne Shirley (from Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery) and Jane Eyre (from Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë).

Frame also cherished poets such as Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, Rupert Brooke, Yeats, and Francis Thompson, "whom I had ‘discovered’ for myself". She sought out philosophical works, believing that one must understand Kant to be a poet, and delved into Chapman’s Homer and Holinshed’s Histories.

Her reading journey evolved from children’s tales to a deeper engagement with poetry, novels, and philosophy. You can follow a similar path, starting with familiar authors and gradually expanding your literary world.