Scented Gardens for the Blind was published by Pegasus Press in 1963, and it represents Frame’s most radical early experiment with narrative form. The novel appears to tell the story of the Dogged family — Doris, her daughter Erlene, and her husband Edward — but the narrative voices are unreliable, shifting, and possibly hallucinatory. By the novel’s end, the reader cannot be certain that any of the events described actually occurred, or that the characters exist outside the consciousness of whoever is narrating.
Frame is exploring the relationship between language and reality — the question of whether stories create the world or merely describe it. The “scented gardens” of the title exist only in language: they are the sensory worlds that blind people construct from smell, touch, and memory, which may be no less real than the visual worlds sighted people inhabit. By extension, all narrative — all fiction — creates worlds that exist only in language, and the distinction between fiction and reality may be less stable than we assume.
This is demanding fiction. Frame makes no concessions to the reader’s desire for stable ground — no reliable narrator, no consistent timeline, no resolution. The novel’s difficulty is not obscurity but precision: Frame is describing experiences (perceptual dissolution, linguistic collapse, the failure of narrative coherence) that cannot be rendered in conventional fictional language without falsifying them.
Collecting Scented Gardens for the Blind
First edition (Pegasus Press, Christchurch, 1963): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First New Zealand edition: $150–$400
- First UK edition (W.H. Allen, 1964): $40–$100
- First US edition (George Braziller, 1964): $25–$60