In her study of Frame's novels, Karin Hansson draws the reader's attention to the importance of remembering ‘that autobiographies are usually disguised novels, just as many novels are disguised autobiographies’.

Most critics have convincingly divided Frame's fiction into two periods. I will more or less follow this chronological classification, too, though while respecting Frame's own refusal and defiance of any categorization, I want to insist on the obvious thematic, philosophical and narrative links between all the texts, bearing in mind my notion of the autobiographical prism none of them seems to escape. Also, for the sake of clarity and convenience, I will not strictly follow the chronology: for example, though Towards Another Summer was published posthumously, it had been written twenty years before the Autobiography. I include it in my last but one section, to emphasize the link with the Autobiography, as it bears obvious autobiographical features together with poetic passages. As for the novels, what interests me most is also their autobiographical tinge, whether it is explicit (in the choice of the characters’ names for example), or more discrete (through some fleeting references to real events or situations). They are all concerned with Frame's favourite themes such as death, exclusion, illness, exile and literary creation, as if the novels were but the illustration of her strong belief in the power of imagination.

The first period involves The Edge of the Alphabet, Scented Gardens for the Blind, The Adaptable Man, A State of Siege and Intensive Care, and the second, the last three novels Daughter Buffalo, Living in the Maniototo and The Carpathians where, as Mercer convincingly argues, optimism substitutes for the sheer pessimism of the first novels, and where the figure of the artist is perhaps more visible and more successful. It is as if Frame had at last found the Mirror City that she has always been looking for.