In the following survey, Rhodes contends that Frame's early short stories are distinguished by her treatment of perception, both of the external world and of the inner lives of characters.
New is a Canadian educator, essayist, editor, and critic. In the following essay, he discusses the theoretical structure and narrative framing devices commonly used by Frame in her writing.
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 Scented Gardens for the Blind.
In the following essay, Evans discusses Frame's career as it is explored in the first three volumes of her autobiography, To the Is-Land, An Angel at My Table, and The Envoy from Mirror City.
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 climate of the eras in which they were published.
In the essay below, Ross analyzes Frame's use of language in Living in the Maniototo, concluding that Frame is able to transcend conventional narrative structures through the manipulation of language.
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."
The intention of this paper is to examine Janet Frame's two worlds, the people who inhabit them and the forces that have created them. This in turn will involve a discussion of the Life/Death, False/Real, Seeing/Blind, Sane/Insane, Treasure/Rubbish dichotomies that occur in all her works. "This" world, the one inhabited by most of us, is one where "no one must be out of tune" …, a place where man has been robbed of his individuality and reduced to nothing more than ...
The theme of the journey has undergone several developments in the literatures of Australia and New Zealand. In both countries (particularly Australia) the concept has been grounded in the mythologies of landscape and history, and in both, the peripatetic movement between 'Home' and colony has registered a deeply embedded sense of cultural schizophrenia. The novels of Janet Frame constitute the most explicit statement in either country of the journey through the contours of the consciousness a...
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 "immense verbal talent."
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."
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 "so eloquent that few of her contemporaries can equal it."
Bevington is an American educator, poet, and critic. In the following review of To the Island, she notes that Frame's book, while part of a trilogy, can stand alone as an autobiographical work.
In the following essay, Hannah finds that "Two Sheep" and A Boy's Will" are ostensibly very different but similarly convey a sense of the world as a menacing place.
In the review below, Haynes offers a mixed assessment of Yellow Flowers in the Antipodean Room, finding in it a "virtuosity" that eventually "wears thin."
In the review below, Sternhell compares the third volume of Frame's autobiography, The Envoy from Mirror City, to the previous volumes, To the Is-Land and An Angel at My Table.
Bliss is an American writer and critic. In the review below, she considers Frame's An Autobiography "an illuminating tour" of the author's upbringing in New Zealand.
Moynahan is an American educator, novelist, essayist, and critic. In the review of Intensive Care below, he criticizes Frame for not answering the many questions she raises in the novel.
Sheed is a British novelist, editor, columnist, and critic. In the following review, he praises Frame's The Adaptable Man, considering the novel "comic, intense, [and stylish."]
There are themes that may be ultimately inimical to fiction. Too absolute a despair about meaningful connection between events is the death of plot. Too great a reluctance to find coherence in personality prohibits the presentation of character. Too feeble a hope of human communication is the withering, ultimately, of style. Janet Frame has sought, in six novels, to express these negative convictions with such brilliance and earnestness that she makes something, if not always a story, of them. Still, one ca...
In the following review, Prescott finds the stories of The Reservoir tiringly depressing, while those of Snowman, Snowman he perceives to be generally unremarkable.
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 reader must plough through, or skip, an old-fashioned Prologue and three little chapters of portentous rhetoric, aggravated by lyrical prose; but thereafter the book becomes extraordinarily interesting, indeed bewitching, and remains so to the very last page. The theme is Past and Present and the struggle between them in the human mind, a ce...
"Living in the Maniototo" could hardly be more different from the fiction that readers may have come to expect from [Janet Frame's] part of the world. Its subject is New Zealanders when they're at home, not in a Maori tourist paradise but in a horrible suburb called Glenheim, where the suicide rate is high and the windowless shopping mall is named Heavenfield…. "Living in the Maniototo" is held together by the consciousness of its narrator, a consciousness as...
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."
Pippett is a British editor, biographer, and critic. In the following review, she finds that Frame expresses "an underlying truth about our common humanity" in Faces in the Water.
[In "The Reservoir," the first volume of a collection of Miss Frame's shorter works], the inference is that the Welfare State has lighted up the dark places of the soul without filling the emptiness. People die without having really lived, and those who make a try at life are usually disappointed…. People pursue a dream and then, when it is within reach, are afraid to grasp it. A middle-class timidity rules, but since the author does not connect the failures of society with the f...
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.
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 discretion.
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 own mysticism…. Nevertheless, she's been compared to Woolf for her impressionistic sensibility, to Rilke for her deliberate obscurity—and I'm tempted to add the names of Barnes, Nin, Mansfield, if only to suggest the rarefied atmosphere one encounters while living in the Maniototo.
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 blunders. Through a fog of deliberately overwritten prose, one gets glimpses of a well-understood working-class New Zealand family muddling along through more than its share of trouble. It is possible to pick up enough of the family's story to realize that Miss Frame is a very sharp judge of character and a writer with a real narrative gift...
The poems in Janet Frame's The Pocket Mirror abound in neat, topographical observations, rendered sensitively and often given a sophisticated twist. She writes easily about the flora and fauna of her New Zealand landscape, with an occasional more interesting note of reservation and disquiet…. But the ease quickly turns into facility and garrulousness, leaving a finished, but hollow, quality in her diction…. There are too many trivia in the collection—poems of embarrassing word-pl...
