SOURCE: "Outside the Brown Picket-Fence," in The Times Literary Supplement, May 31, 1991, p. 21.

In the following review, Aitken judges the short fiction in The Reservoir and Other Stories "powerful and refreshing."

People are sometimes admitted to psychiatric hospitals as a result of the misdemeanour of writing: this book set its author free and cancelled the leucotomy she had been about to suffer. The twenty-four stories in The Lagoon were written in the late 1940s when Janet Frame—in flight from school teaching—was in and out of mental hospitals (diagnosed as schizophrenic) and worked as a domestic in hotels and hospitals. The stories were sent by a psychiatrist to Denis Glover, who placed one in the literary magazine Landfall and published the collection in 1951. Its obsession with childhood affronted the widespread critical assumption that New Zealand literature had put away childish things, but the book won the Hubert Church...