Abstract
This chapter reviews the most canonical of modernist women in light of the unfinished biographical projects. It talks about Virginia Woolf's 1928 “joke” biography of Vita Sackville-West as an unfinished text, a work that provides a theoretical key for reading the queer temporality of the other passion projects. The chapter suggests that valuing the unfinished as an aesthetic category can bring the lessons of queer feminist biographers into sharper focus. It also talks about Woolf's most legendary passion project—Orlando, her 1928 “biography” of her lover, Vita Sackville-West—in order to suggest that even finished, published books might sometimes prompt readers to read them in light of the unfinished aesthetic of queer feminist modernism. The chapter ends by considering how reevaluating unpublished and unfinished work shifts our understanding of modernism's past, present, and future history.
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