One of the most abundant and significant sources of knowledge about women biography. We turn repeatedly to the individual life, both to formulate and to illustrate our more general observations about the nature of experience. It imperative, then, when we look to individual lives for such knowledge that, first, we draw from a broad range of lives before defining female and that, second, we conduct a thorough, honest, and sensitive examination of those lives we choose as somehow representative of the condition. Specifically, we must include lesbian women among women and lesbian experience as part of women's lives. Moreover, because biography such an important resource for women's studies, and because the art of like other scholarly endeavors, has been limited by the often deliberate blindness of patriarchal vision, women must examine biography as a genre before snatching it up as a feminist educational tool. The essential difficulty which a biographer faces this: do I discover the truth about my subject's life? Two major barriers intervene. The first barrier grows out of the fact that the biographer has to deal with the sort of conflicting evidence about a person's life which reflects the nature of personality itself. That is, each human being composed of what Virginia Woolf calls a multiplicity of selves. In Orlando, her fantasy biography of her friend and sometime lover, Vita Sackville-West, Woolf's narrator asks, how many different people are there not-Heaven help us-all having lodgement at one time in the human spirit? Some say two thousand and fifty-two . ... A biography, however, the narrator continues, is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves.[1] Biographies of women have often failed because biographers have not acknowledged the complexity of women's lives. The second barrier distance. The biographer works at a geographical, temporal, cultural, sexual, racial, experiential, and temperamental remove of varying degrees from her/his subject. The result unavoidable inaccuracy or distortion. This distance between biographer and subject increased markedly if that subject female, and even more so if the subject lesbian, primarily because most biographers maintain the sexist and heterosexist assumptions about women typical of scholars and of a patriarchal culture at large. As a result, women's lives have been recounted and judged in masculinist, heterosexist, racist (and all other -ists) terms which preclude the possibility of women's possessing full humanity. In other words, while the lives of women have been limited by patriarchal restrictions, the history and interpretation of those lives have been likewise straightjacketed; consequently, it hard to determine even what women's lives have been like, let alone what they mean. What follows a lesbian feminist reading of biography as a genre, presented in the form of several syndromes which affect life writing about women in general and lesbians in particular.