This thesis intends to examine the most significant examples of literary autobiography in New Zealand to the present day. These are Sargeson (1981) by Frank Sargeson, I Passed This Way (1979) by Sylvia Ashton-Warner, An Autobiography (1994) by Lauris Edmond, and An Autobiography (1989) by Janet Frame. My aims are twofold: to argue that there is a general tendency in New Zealand autobiography to write spiritual autobiography (this involves first showing how the above are spiritual autobiographies), and to interrogate why this is. Is it a case of the general social climate in New Zealand, pmiicularly in regards to the status of the artist in a provincial puritan society, or is it due to different, personal reasons that each writer writes spiritual autobiography? In the introduction I will briefly give an historical overview of New Zealand literary autobiography (and biography also, because together they have emerged from a few isolated works in the 1950s to be significant literary genres), summarising why the above are the most significant, and discussing why I have excluded Charles Brasch's Indirections (1981). I will also discuss the origins and history of the spiritual autobiography, particularly focusing on the Christian conversion experience which is replaced by the epiphany in the secular (non-religious; literary) autobiography. Epiphanies in the modernist fiction of Katherine Mansfield and James Joyce will be compared to confirm the basic strncture of the modernist epiphany; Joyce is especially significant because his semi-autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) is also a spiritual autobiography, and has been influential in the New Zealand context. Chapter 1 will focus on Sargeson. Chapter 2 will look at Edmond and AshtonWarner concurrently. The final chapter, Chapter 3, will examine Frame. There will be a brief conclusion in which all four authors will be compared. Details of all references in the text will appear in the List of Works Consulted.