SOURCE: A review of To the Is-Land: An Autobiography, in World Literature Today, Vol. 57, No. 2, Spring, 1983, p. 352.

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.

Herbert Spencer observed that the autobiographer "is obliged to omit from his narrative the commonplace of daily life," while Somerset Maugham noted that the writer of an autobiography often places too great an emphasis on matters that are more common than supposed. Certainly Janet Frame, in this first volume of her autobiography [To the Is-Land] (which ends with her acceptance to university), has not observed Spencer's dictum: almost every incident, observation, riposte or reaction has been recalled for inclusion, though not always of interest to the reader or of ready significance to her own psychological or literary development.

It is this lack of...