SOURCE: "The Frame Story World of Janet Frame," in Essays on Canadian Writing, Vol. 29, Spring, 1984, pp. 175-191.

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.

Since 1951, when her first work, The Lagoon, appeared, Janet Frame has gathered a faithful international readership. At first noticed only in her native New Zealand, where as a short story writer she remained in Katherine Mansfield's shadow, she began to publish in the United States and England (with George Braziller and W.H. Allen) in the early 1960s. In 1960 Braziller reprinted her first novel, Owls Do Cry (published initially in Christchurch in 1957), and in a spate of creative energy, Frame produced nine more novels, two books of short stories, a children's tale, and a book of poems over the next nineteen years...