SOURCE: "Janet Frame and the Art of Life," in Meanjin, Vol. 44, No. 3, September, 1985, pp. 375-83.

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.

With the publication at sixty of the first three volumes of her autobiography (To the Is-land, 1983; An Angel at My Table, 1984; The Envoy from Mirror City, 1985), Janet Frame gives the impression of rounding out her long career as a writer. Her first published story appeared just after the Second World War; since then there have been five volumes of short fiction, one of poetry, ten novels, a children's book, and three volumes of autobiography. If the latter is in fact the end of things it will conclude one of the oddest and most distinctive bodies of writing in the...