Reading Kate Atkinson’s Life after Life (2013) in the context of theories of the historical novel (Georg Lukács, Fredric Jameson) and counterfactual fiction (Catherine Gallagher, Andrew Miller, Paul Saint-Amour) sheds light on an overlooked genealogy of the feminist modernist historical novel. Atkinson’s novels are often cited as examples of postmodern metafiction, but in fact her work is more directly indebted to modernist experiments in counterfactual historical writing by figures like Virginia Woolf. Moreover, this inheritance, inasmuch as it informs Atkinson’s focus on the untold lives of ordinary women, is not only modernist but feminist.
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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 The chapter ends by considering how reevaluating unpublished and unfinished work shifts our understanding of modernism's past, present, and future history.
This chapter focuses on the future audience imagined for many of the biographical passion projects. It talks about more recent experiments in biographical writing by Lisa Cohen, Jenny Diski, Nathalie Léger, Monique Truong, and Kate Zambreno that share intellectual and affective motivations with the modernist practices. If the biographical and archival projects hope to assure a future readership for queer feminist life stories, then these contemporary writers volunteer as that readership through the generosity of their attention and the experimental forms of their continued custodianship. The chapter suggests that they write with the affective engagement and sense of generic activism that so many mid-century women harnessed to preserve the lives of their friends, partners, lovers, wives, and companions. In this sense, the chapter ends with a generation of women writers who, like their ancestors at midcentury, see the work of writing as inseparable from the work of recovery.
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