SOURCE: "'Farthest from the Heart': The Autobiographical Parables of Janet Frame," in Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 27, No. 1, Spring, 1981, pp. 31-40.

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 writing for an evening of light entertainment. The atmosphere of her work is almost unrelievedly dark; its texture thick with imagery and allusion; its plots full of deceits engineered to trick the reader; its significance half-stated and often obscure, as if the process of writing has not fully released the impulses which have brought it about. It is this last quality which I wish to discuss in this essay: the sense gained by any copious reader of her work that it represents a recurring engagement with the business of writing itself, with the relationships of words and things, and with...