Janet Frame’s Commons in Between My Father and the King (2012)

This article proposes an analysis of the notion of the commons, in the sense of forms of social organization linked to a common or shared good, in several of Janet Frame’s early short stories. The stories discussed include “Between My Father and the King” and “The Plum Tree and the Hammock”, from her posthumous collection Between My Father and the King (2012), and “The Lagoon”, the title story from her 1951 debut collection. I argue that in her early fiction, Frame was viscerally aware of the importance of the notion of property in the (post)colonial context of the British Empire, of how it seeped into everyday language, and of the deep and long-term impact the variable significance of the term could have. It is rewarding to re-read these early stories in times of intense public debate about the status of the foreshore and seabed in Aotearoa New Zealand.