SOURCE: "Janet Frame," in International Literature in English: Essays on the Major Writers, edited by Robert L. Ross, Garland Publishing, 1991, pp. 547-56.

Potter is an American educator and short story writer who has lived in New Zealand. In the essay below, she provides a brief synopsis of each of Frame's major works and discusses the literary climate of the eras in which they were published.

Janet Frame has characterized the New Zealand society of her youth as a house with neither basement nor attic. This metaphor illuminates only one aspect of her complicated background. More substantial details of Frame's life are treated impressionistically in her three-volume autobiography, particularly the enduring poverty of the Depression, tragic accidents, and a series of misfortunes that haunted her early years.

She was born in Dunedin, in 1924, and grew up in Oamaru, the child of an itinerant railway engineer father and a mother...