The Passion Projects: Modernist Women, Intimate Archives, Unfinished Lives by Melanie Micir (review)

Melanie Micir's new book, which is about unfinished biography, comes to a stirring finish. In the preceding pages of The Passion Projects, Micir has noted at several junctures why it's worthwhile, indeed imperative, to retrain critical attention on biography, and specifically the biographies of writers who have never been monumentally immortalized. Yet what may be her most striking articulation of this point appears in the final paragraph of her coda. As "scholars have shown," she observes, "the midcentury consolidation of modernism into an object of academic study took place primarily in male-dominated biographies, single-author studies, anthologies, and institutional archives. … New Criticism may have focused readers' attention on the words rather than the lives, but these foundational biographical acts helped cement which words were remembered" (139). And thus The Passion Projects is in part "an argument that the act of stepping away from the biographical is the privilege of those who are already remembered, whose lives are already imprinted upon history" (140).

The salience of this formulation can hardly be overstated. At least since the 1970s, there has been a tension, in and around literary scholarship, between theoretical accounts of textual production that critique the prominence of the author figure, on the one hand, and efforts to bring greater recognition to women authors, queer authors, authors of color, and other marginalized writers, on the other. Many critiques of biographical emphases have been well-intentioned—often rooted, for example, in a sense that hoary myths of the heroism of the individual subject ultimately support exploitative social arrangements by downplaying the power of superindividual forces over individual lives. As Micir eloquently captures, however, this form of critique of the subject has come, broadly speaking, at the expense of subjects whose lives—not just experiences but also conditions, not just achievements but also perspectives—have not yet been registered, sanctioned, or canonized. That the backgrounding of biography in this crucial sense still continues, half a century later, is a source of energizing frustration for Micir, who at the beginning of her coda aptly cites Madelyn Detloff's adumbration, in the inaugural number of Feminist Modernist Studies, of "the Sisyphe position," an "affective state that recognizes the 'difficult, unfortunately repetitive, seemingly unwinnable task before the queer feminist cultural worker …'" (131).

With its inventiveness, acuity, elegance of prose, and (yes) passion, The Passion Projects makes this task look a little more winnable. As Micir explains in her introduction, her effort is to read "biography as an activist genre undertaken in late career by queer feminist writers determined to resist the marginalization and exclusion of their friends, colleagues, lovers, companions, and wives from dominant narratives of literary history" (3). All unfinished in one sense or another, the projects on which Micir focuses span a range from biographical narrative to annotated collection of items from the shared past of living assembler and dead beloved. Some were initiated with the prospect of monetary reward distantly in view, but as Micir notes, their major impetus was not financial: a "passion project is work that its practitioner undertakes for a reason other than professional duty or immediate gain," work "in the service of unreasonable pursuits: memory, legacy, the future world" (14, 15).

Each chapter then "theorizes a specific type of unfinished biographical act and provides several case studies that range across the middle decades of the twentieth century" (15). In chapter one, Micir focuses on projects especially strongly directed to audiences in a future where queer partnerships would be valued. Una Troubridge and Evguenia Souline, each seeking to control how their lover Radclyffe Hall would be remembered, also reflected on how the publication of Hall's intimate life might, in Troubridge's words, "cheer and encourage those"—meaning those future inverts—who "come after us" (26). Sylvia Townsend Warner imagined a queerness-receptive readership to come in struggling to decide what of T. H. White's sexual life she might include in her biography of...