New book: The Passion Projects: Modernist Women, Intimate Archives, Unfinished Lives

Posted by mdever on November 3, 2019 in archives, feminism, humanities, letters, literary heritage, literature, manuscripts, Publication, research

A very exciting new publication from Princeton University Press is Melanie Micir‘s, The Passion Projects: Modernist Women, Intimate Archives, Unfinished Lives. 

From the publisher’s website:

“Melanie Micir explores an extensive body of material, including Sylvia Townsend Warner’s carefully annotated letters to her partner Valentine Ackland, Djuna Barnes’s fragmented drafts about the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Margaret Anderson’s collection of modernist artifacts, and Virginia Woolf’s joke biography of her friend and lover Vita Sackville-West, the novel Orlando. Whether published in encoded desire or squirreled away in intimate archives, these “passion projects” recorded life then in order to summon an audience now, and stand as important predecessors of queer and feminist recovery projects that have shaped the contemporary understanding of the field.”