SOURCE: "In the Imagination's True Country," in The New York Times Book Review, October 6, 1985, p. 30

In the review below, Sternhell compares the third volume of Frame's autobiography, The Envoy from Mirror City, to the previous volumes, To the Is-Land and An Angel at My Table.

Even as a small child, Janet Frame believed that words were magic. She collected bright moments of language as other children might gather shiny marbles or seashells, protective totems against the crowded, puzzling world of home and school. She was not completely surprised, years later, when literature quite literally saved her—when a scheduled lobotomy was canceled at the last minute because her first book of short stories had unexpectedly won a prize. "It was my writing that at last came to my rescue," she told us quietly in An Angel at My Table, her second autobiographical volume, after detailing eight horrifying years...