Gifted and “Possessed”: Reading and Writing the Adaptable Frame

Abstract

This article explores Patrick Evans’s neglected novel Gifted, arguing that Evans, as novelist, wilfully forges, inhabits and defends the same authorial ground his criticism of the work of Janet Frame assailed for decades. Positioning Gifted as part penance, part reparation, part justification for Evans’s literary criticism, this essay negotiates the dynamics of equivocal blend that characterise Evans’s “gifted” relationship with Frame and finds, within Gifted, an enactment of the continuum between paratext and adaptation.