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 Award and rescued Frame from her well-meaning tormentors. It makes its English début, forty years on, launching Bloomsbury's new series of pocket-sized classics. If the format is self-conscious (three different styles of gold lettering in seven words), the work—albeit sometimes incompletely realized—is powerful and refreshing.

It is not surprising that commonsensical New Zealanders found Frame disturbing. She understandably disclaims identity with the characters of her fictions, but these stories, as aquaintance with her autobiographies demonstrates, show the white light of experience passing through the prism of imagination. Her personae inhabit private enclosures, understanding the world and the words which identify its parts in a partial, literal, visionary way. A small girl interprets the bigness of her retarded older friend as an emblem of comfortable circumstances and large abilities. A family visit to the seaside, made almost disastrous by the mother's incompetence, is saved by the children's accepting animal energy and scarcely formulated perception of beauty. Sisters search unavailingly for matching thread to mend their father's best trousers, fired by the quest, perceiving only dimly his need to remain respectable at union meetings during the Depression.

Frame's adult protagonists are separated by deprivation, death or madness from their fellows. There is sad comedy—a failed man and the women who distance themselves from him—and desolation: a patient knits a gift for a nurse but is destroyed by her inability to give away the object she has made; another realizes that "We were all walking inside ourselves . . . touching the brown picket-fences of our minds." Untold stories lurk behind those let out for inspection.

Authority figures—parents, teachers or psychiatrists—are stifling, threatening and often ineffectual, especially in their attempts at love. Their charges are fearfully, enviously aware of "the outside world", a phrase resonant of Eden and Apocalypse. Frame's disastrous teens and twenties would have destroyed most people, yet these pages sparkle: the prose has the sharpness of imagist poetry but its purposefulness and irony preclude mere exquisiteness; the ecstasy of the five senses is untarnished by self-pity. Often very brief, always closely focused, the stories echo the world outside the picket-fence: the popular songs, picnics, lolly scrambles, ice creams, the movies. The remote cries of gulls counterpoint the savage jealousies of little girls; the earthy taste of uncooked turnips informs the comedy of uncomprehensively refined cousins.

Frame uses repetition to thematic and musical effect. "Snapdragons" begins with a woman about to be taken home from an asylum watching bees apparently trapped in the throats of red flowers. Her mother arrives and she tries, unsuccessfully, to achieve rapport. The story ends: "Would she never come closer? Her little red house seemed such a long way over the hills. When the wind passed it seemed to rock and swing, it looked like a snapdragon."

The closing story announces a decision to abandon fiction while, ironically, demonstrating a rich talent for it: ". . . I'm going to put three dots with my typewriter, impressively, and then I'm going to begin . . .". This affirmation of intent to carry on is also a cry of despair: "I think I must be frozen inside with no heart to speak of. I think I've got the wrong way of looking at Life."