SOURCE: "Daphne's Metamorphoses in Janet Frame's Early Novels," in Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, Vol. 6, No. 2, April, 1975, pp. 23-37.

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.

Owls Do Cry, Janet Frame's first novel, begins with a message in italics signed "Daphne from the deadroom." Other such mysterious and poetical messages by the same hand are scattered throughout the story which introduces us to Daphne as a child and tells us about the circumstances which led her to the madhouse. Daphne is the first version of a recurrent figure in Janet Frame's early novels which I propose to examine in the present article. The other versions are Istina Mavet in Faces in the Water, Thora Pattern in The...