[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 spent in and out of mental hospitals. "It is little wonder that I value writing as a way of life when it actually saved my life."

"It actually saved my life." To Miss Frame, now one of New Zealand's best-known novelists, writing has always salvaged the past and promised the future; it has always offered a way out and a way in. The awkward, eager girl she described in To the Is-Land the first volume of her autobiography, lived as much in the world of English and French literature as in the small South Island town of Oamaru—her homemade school tunic, painfully tight after years of use, may have been spotted with patches; blood leaked embarrassingly through her bulky, homemade sanitary towels; one sister had drowned and her brother, an epileptic, was seriously ill, but the teenage Janet wrote in her diary, "I'm going to be a poet."

The lonely young woman of An Angel at My Table, mistakenly diagnosed as schizophrenic and trapped in the back ward of Seacliff Hospital for "loonies"—a chilling experience Miss Frame recounts in her powerful second novel, Faces in the Water—never doubts her calling. "If I could not live within the world of writing books," she wonders, "then where could I survive?" And the adult novelist of Miss Frame's latest volume, living in London and typing eagerly in rented rooms, still seeks solace in the joy of words: "Language that had betrayed, changed, influenced, could still befriend the isolated, could help when human beings had withdrawn their help."

The Envoy From Mirror City is a memoir of travel and imagination. It opens with Miss Frame's seasick ocean voyage and her arrival in London on the day after her 32d birthday, in 1956, and ends eight years later after a seasick journey home—away from ancient Europe, which "was so much on the map of the imagination" with "so many layers of mapmakers," and back to a country where it was possible "to be a mapmaker for those who will follow nourished by this generation's layers of the dead."

The Envoy him- or herself is an imaginary traveler, "that watching self, who was already waiting to guide me to my fictional home," both a companion on the trail and the midwife of creation. Mirror City, "where everything I have known or seen or dreamed of is bathed in the light of another world," is the imagination's true country, "that wonderful view over all time and space, the transformation of ordinary facts and ideas into a shining palace of mirrors."

Because the real journey of Miss Frame's book, and of her life, is the passage to Mirror City, the daily events she meticulously records seem curiously insubstantial. It's not that nothing happens during these years. She travels to Ibiza and Andorra, marveling like any other tourist at the wonderful strangeness, "the colour of the olive trees and of the buildings thumbed and worn like old stone pages."

She loses her virginity after "waking one morning with a haunting thought that I (shy, in my thirty-third year, travelling overseas to 'broaden my experience') might never have another such experience."

She visits the Institute of Psychiatry at Maudsley Hospital and discovers that she never suffered from schizophrenia, a verdict she finds unexpectedly terrifying: "Oh why had they robbed me of my schizophrenia which had been the answer to all my misgivings about myself? Like King Lear I had gone in search of 'the truth' and I now had nothing." But all this eventfulness is a mere backdrop to the writing, to Mirror City; Miss Frame meets many brightly colored characters but makes no friends. When she sails back to New Zealand she asks a librarian from the British Museum to see her off, "unable to face a solitary departure."

If The Envoy From Mirror City is less compelling than the earlier volumes of Miss Frame's autobiography, it may be because writing is less immediate a metaphor than childhood or madness—and perhaps because the discussions of her literary processes remain determinedly mystical, with Mirror City always gleaming over the horizon. It's difficult not to be charmed, however, by Miss Frame's luminous prose (she always knew that words were magic). And it's impossible not to be moved by this extraordinary portrait of a woman for whom art is life, a life well worth living.