"e;Through the long corridor of distance"e;

Examined in this study are twentieth- and twenty-first century autobiographies and memoirs by major New Zealand women writers. Brought together for the first time in a single study, texts by Sylvia Ashton-Warner, Janet Frame, Lauris Edmond, Fiona Kidman, Barbara Anderson, Ruth Park, and Ruth Dallas are analysed with the aid of spatial concepts that probe unexplored aspects of their life-narratives. Drawing on recent and revised concepts of place and space in cultural geography, philosophy, and sociology, the book ac knowledges the link between identities and locations in a non-essentialist way by pinpointing the various forms of inhabit ing and being in space. It refutes the idea of autobiographies as pure self-referential texts, and shows how these works deploy their own horizon of reference.