Janet Frame Summary

Critical Essay by The New Yorker This first novel ["Owls Do Cry"] is very promising, full of the beginner's desire to get everything in, and full of good things mixed up with blu... Read more

Critical Essay by Honor Tracy The only obligation, said Henry James, to which in advance we may hold a novel is that it be interesting; and if this is true The Adaptable Man is very good indeed. The ... Read more

Critical Essay by The Times Literary Supplement The poems in Janet Frame's The Pocket Mirror abound in neat, topographical observations, rendered sensitively and often given a sophisticated tw... Read more

Critical Essay by W. D. Ashcroft The theme of the journey has undergone several developments in the literatures of Australia and New Zealand. In both countries (particularly Australia) the concept ha... Read more

Critical Essay by Carole Cook Janet Frame may be the most important novelist to come out of New Zealand, but her books are so unlike what we expect a novel to be that they almost evanesce into their ... Read more

In the essay below, Delbaere-Garant traces similarities between Daphne, the protagonist of Owls Do Cry, and the characters in Frame's novels Faces in the Water, The Edge of the Alphabet, and Sc... Read more

In the following essay, Evans traces the parallels between themes, techniques, and metaphors in Frame's early stories to those in her later works. No one approaches Janet Frame's writ... Read more

McLeod is an Australian-born educator, poet, and critic. In the following review, he discusses Frame's autobiographical style in To the Is-Land, considering it unsatisfactory and lacking in dis... Read more

In the review of An Angel at My Table below, McLeod criticizes the kind of autobiographical information Frame includes in her work. Two years ago Janet Frame brought out the first volume, To the Is... Read more

In the following essay, Mercer examines Frame's poetry in The Pocket Mirror as well as the more poetic passages of her novels, finding both to be "innovative and engrossing." W... Read more

Pick is an Austrian-born novelist, editor, and translator. In the following review, he discusses the literary device of allegory as it pertains to Frame's Faces in the Water. When Miss Frame... Read more

In the following essay, Brown comments on the way in which Frame analyzes New Zealand society in her novel Owls Do Cry. Janet Frame emerged in 1954 after eight years in hospital to join a literary ... Read more

Potter is an American educator and short story writer who has lived in New Zealand. In the essay below, she provides a brief synopsis of each of Frame's major works and discusses the literary c... Read more

Crawford is a Scottish educator, writer, and critic. In the mixed review below, he praises Frame's The Edge of the Alphabet for its rhetoric and cadence, stating that Frame writes in a language... Read more

In the review below, Anderson praises Frame's A State of Siege, considering it "a truly singular reading experience." The truly singular reading experience does not present its... Read more

In the review below, Evans finds that while The Rainbirds is occasionally threatened by "artistically gratuitous passages of authorial comment," it is exemplary of Frame's "... Read more

Corbett is an American educator, writer, and critic. In the review below, he approaches Frame's fiction ambivalently, stating that Intensive Care is "like no other novel I have ever read... Read more

In the following essay, Mattei interprets the story "Two Sheep" as an existential fable. 'Everything is always a story, but the loveliest ones are those that get written and ar... Read more

In the following excerpt, Auchincloss provides a mixed review of the collections The Reservoir and Snowman, Snowman. Janet Frame's anomalous stories and fables, thirty-eight of them, come bo... Read more

In the following essay, Evans discusses Frame's "tendency to write about herself and her experiences as if she were writing about other things." No one approaches Janet Frame&#... Read more

In the following review, Adcock observes that Frame's collection You Are Now Entering the Human Heart mixes realism with "bizarre fantasy and semi-didactic allegory." The first... Read more

In the following excerpt, Panny explicates the short story "Snowman, Snowman" as an allegory. Whom we might meet as we pass into the "for ever" of death is one of the qu... Read more