Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife

by Francesca Wade

From the celebrated author of Square Haunting comes a biography as unconventional and surprising as the life it tells.

'Think of the Bible and Homer, think of Shakespeare and think of me,' wrote Gertrude Stein in 1936. Admirers called her a genius, sceptics a she remains one of the most confounding - and contested - writers of the twentieth century.

In this literary detective story, Francesca Wade delves into the creation of the Stein myth. We see her posing for Picasso's portrait; at the centre of Bohemian Parisian life hosting the likes of Matisse and Hemingway; racing through the French countryside with her enigmatic companion Alice B. Toklas; dazzling American crowds on her sell-out tour for her sensational Autobiography - a veritable celebrity.

Yet Stein hoped to be remembered not for her personality but for her work. From her deathbed, she charged her partner with securing her place in literary history. How would her legend shift once it was Toklas's turn to tell the stories - especially when uncomfortable aspects of their past emerged from the archive? Using astonishing never-before-seen material, Wade uncovers the origins of Stein's radical writing, and reveals new depths to the storied relationship which made it possible.

This is Gertrude Stein as she was when nobody was captivating, complex and human.

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, History, LGBT, Memoir, Art, Biography Memoir

480 pages, Hardcover

First published May 20, 2025

About the author

Francesca Wade has written for publications including the London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, the Financial Times, the New Statesman, and Prospect. She is editor of The White Review and a winner of the Biographers’ Club Tony Lothian Prize. She lives in London.

Reviews

[Katia N]

It seems that Gertrude Stein is experiencing some kind of renaissance lately, at least in collective conscience of English speaking female writers. This biography is a bestseller of a sort. Lauren Elkin, a writer and prominent translator is working on another. Deborah Levy has just published My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein. It is not like Ms Stein has been ignored before. So i am not sure what exactly has sparkled this latest wave of interest. But inadvertently i’ve become a beneficiary.

Before reading this book, i did not know much at all about Gertrude Stein. However, my primary reason for reading was not her person. Lately, i’ve become fascinated in the art and limits of biographical writing. I am interested how a biographer addresses the sheer unknowability of a human personality: to which extent can one know someone else? A human being is like a multidimensional puzzle. She reveals a different side to different people and at a different time. But no-one would be able to see the whole.

This is philosophy, but on a more practical level i am curious about the craft: which features the writer chooses to underscore in interaction between a human life and a wider background of the epoch; how she works with the documentary evidence and how she uses her creativity and imagination at the same time, especially to close the gaps and resolve contradictions; and meta element: how she reveals in the text her own personality; is she open about her subjectivity or uses other strategies? There are different opinions. For example, according to Goethe the aim of biography is:

To exhibit the man in relation to the features of his time; and to show to what extent they have opposed or favoured his progress; what view of mankind and the world he has formed from them, and how far he himself, if an artist, poet, or author, may externally reflect them.

About two hundred years later Gabriel Josipovici is more sceptical about the usefulness of the whole enterprise:

For biography, no matter how tactfully it is written, has the effect Sartre described years ago, of imposing a false teleology on its subject, making us see early setbacks and failures entirely in the light of later triumphs, and of giving a shape and meaning to the life which it did not have for the one who lived

It seems modern day biographers have taken this point seriously and try to some extent not to impose this ‘false teleology’, - instead to reveal more complex interplay of factors in someone’s life. However while dealing with ‘posterity’ almost by definition they have to deal with ‘meaning’ of life and here it gets often quite messy.

Another question is how to structure a biography. Traditionally they are written in a chronological order depicting someone from ‘cradle to the grave’. I appreciate it might be necessary in academic writing. But personally sometimes I would prefer a biography as ‘shards’ of the character, a constellation of different traits inferred based upon the evidence of diaries and correspondence, events and people interacting with this life. That would enable to present a person like a painting rather than a mechanism. I’ve tried to play with this in my review of Wittgenstein’s bio.

Now it is easier to explain why I've chosen this book. In her introduction Ms Wade says: ‘From that single leather notebook, my project soon expanded into a far larger enquiry – into the life and legend of Gertrude Stein, but also into the nature of biography, and the way literary history is made.’

The leather notebook in question is a new addition to Stein’s archives. But the last bit about ‘nature of biography’ was the bit that has drown my attention. Wade has also promised an investigation into ‘who has the right to anyone’s story’. Based upon this, I've expected more meta-musings and the presence of Wade’s subjectivity in the book. My expectations were only partly met in this respect.

However, this bio might be an ideal starting point for those who want to find out about Stein's life. The book has appeared to be a solid, very well written, but quite traditional biography. Only the last chapter has delivered a bit more in terms of the meta-discourse. As a whole the book is mainly focused on the facts of Stein’s life and the life of Alice Tocklas, her partner, after Stein’s death (updated for the archive’s new addition).

Also Wade engages with Stein’s work and occasionally her observations are very apt, especially on Stein’s early writing. However, this becomes more tangential, in the later part of the book. It is probably a necessary limitation due to sheer scope of task Wade posits to herself: to describe both Stein’s life and afterlife. It is unfortunate or maybe even inevitable that her afterlife is still centred more around her celebrity rather than her writing. So Wade tells this fascinating story.

She starts the book with a successful opening: ‘Biography, like detective fiction, tends to begin with a corpse – but Stein well knew that a writer’s life does not end at death, if their work has the power to survive them.’

Wade’s work has indeed started with a corpse, but not the one of Stein who has evidently took a significant effort to preserve her own posterity. Wade project was triggered by ‘the corpse’ of Leo Katz, a scholar who has had a privileged access to Stein’s archive. His own unpublished notes were recently added to the archive on his death. Wade has jumped on the chance to be the one of the ‘pioneers’ ploughing through his work there.

Katz seemed to be interested in the genesis of The Making of Americans Stein’s earlier majestic and not widely understood work. He has managed to come across her notebooks containing character diagrams as well as the classification of her friends and acquaintances. Later, he has managed to secure the confidence of Ms Toklas. He has spent months interviewing her after Stein’s death.

Following Stein's notebooks and correspondence Katz has come to conclusions Otto Weininger’s work has got a formative influence both on her own personality and ‘The Making Americans’.

Katz’s breakthrough came when he was able to pinpoint to the spring of 1908 a moment of euphoria prompted by Stein’s reading of Sex and Character: An Investigation of Fundamental Principles. His interest was sparked by a letter, found in the archive, from Stein’s college friend Marion Walker: ‘By the way,’ Walker had written, ‘in an idle moment I read the book on sex which you said exactly embodied your views – the one by the Viennese lunatic.’

‘Viennese lunatic’ is not a bad characterisation as in his book Otto has mixed certain profound insights with huge misogynistic and anti-Semitic vitriol. But his approach to psychological types has impressed Stein well enough. She was primed to psychology by her earlier Harvard studies as well. As a result, she ‘identified twenty types, into which she placed all her friends.’ She also has conducted certain experiments in psychoanalysis by subjecting to interviews the one of her more willing friends.

In the notebooks, even Ms Toklas has not escaped ‘her analysis’. She has just recently met Alice and devoted to her a few lines Katz later discovered. She wrote:

Alice was “a liar of the most sordid, unillumined, undramatic unimaginative prostitute type. Coward, ungenerous, conscienceless, mean vulgarly triumphant and remorseless, caddish,” an “elderly spinster mermaid” who “dressed in whore clothes.

‘Prostitute type’ is a borrowing from Otto’s not very sophisticated classification for possible female types. Still the assessment of a potential love interest seems a little hush. One hopes she has later softened her view somewhat as to a large extent she has become dependent on Ms Toklas in their simbiótic life-long relationship. However, it gives a good window into Stein’s mind in her approach to ‘The Making of Americans’. It seems to be a novel focusing at the caracteres as human types and their connections. Wade writes:

The Making of Americans is less a novel than a constellation of the human mind, a map of reality that yields its most pressing insights into the mind of its anxiously questing narrator, convinced she is on her way to a revelation of deep importance, but struggling to keep her text from spiralling out of her control.

This is close to that my ideal of biographical writing. I haven't read much of Stein’s work yet. But somehow i am not surprised that her bestseller that made her a household name in America was a fake The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.

Stein herself felt her creative and intellectual abilities were quite exceptional. In literature she wanted to ‘destroy 19th century novel’ and create in writing something akin cubist paintings that she has promoted (her life-long friendship/cooperation with Picasso is a well known fact). Otto has played a role in her views. Wade writes:

Weininger, had argued of a genius is his ‘passionate and urgent desire for immortality’. Stein considered herself a genius; in her writing, geniuses (like saints) are always portrayed as ‘most intensely alive’, standing somehow outside of time due to an ability to see themselves beyond mortal existence, which she called ‘a future life feeling.

Otto believed that only a man could be ‘genius’, but a ‘masculine’ woman could get close enough. Being a queer woman, Stein felt she has got it. Wade claims that ‘Weininger’s book offered validation not only to her system, but to herself.’. With its help Stein has realised her own perceived genius and has started to prepare herself for ‘immortality’.

Alice did help in this conviction with her sheer faith, devotion and practical help typing all manuscripts Stein produced since they’ve started living together.

However, Stein was convinced that her afterlife would be possible not through her celebrity but strictly through her work. She believed a time had to pass before people would start appreciating her writing. So she should keep it all in order to pass on to future generations. It is also fair to say that in spite of her strange experiments with classifying humans into types etc., she seemed to believe that a person would be best understood through her art rather than anything else. She wrote:

Clarity is of no importance because nobody listens and nobody knows what you mean no matter what you mean, nor how clearly you mean what you mean. But if you have vitality enough of knowing enough of what you mean, somebody and sometime and sometimes a great many will have to realize that you know what you mean and so they will agree that you mean what you know, what you know you mean, which is as near as anybody can come to understanding any one.

However, her vocation did not seem to distract her from having an extensive social life, cultivating circle of friends and enemies, developing certain notoriety as well as celebrity. Wade provides a lot of fascinating anecdotes from her life in Paris. Stein seemed to be adored by some. Picasso pleased her not only by painting her portrait but by addressing her ‘a man of letters’. She took it as a compliment! However, there was no love lost between her and many other modernists. Some of their comments seemed quite unfair. I’ve read somewhere that Joyce has devoted to her a few lines in ‘Finnegans Wake’, where ‘he denied any connection with ‘that eyebold earbig noseknaving gutthroat’. (I am not sure how true is that connection though). However, it is definitely true that Elliot warned, a ‘new barbarian age’ of literature was likely to dawn if young writers would follow in her footsteps. Woolf was simply plain antisemitic in relation to her.

The first half of Wade’s book deals with ups and downs of Stein's life not shining away from numerous controversies including merciless cut off for life by the couple of their friends and family members (Stein’s brother Leo, Mabel Dodge and Hemingway were the most notorious examples); or the couple’s remaining in France through the WW2. Being Jewish lesbians they were excellent candidates for the nazis. But they’ve managed to survive pretty well in rural France. Moreover, even Stein’s unique collection of paintings has been preserved in Paris. (A lot has being written about this including the role of Bernard Fay, a regime high official.*) Wade seems to be more ‘understanding’ to the couple’s plight compared to earlier writers like Janet Malcom. She attempts to pinpoint more palatable reasons than outright collaboration. The book might be worth reading for an update of this discussion alone.

However, the most successful feature of the book for me was how much space Wade has devoted to Toklas’s life after Gertrude’s death. This was the most poignant and revealing aspect (more than Ms Stein’s obsession with her posterity per se). Reading this book, i’ve developed a strong impression that since they’ve met they’ve genially become a single item, a psychologically inseparable organism. If they travel, they’ve always done it together, they cut off friends together for life, survived the war and arguably they’ve even written books together. I am not sure in which form Stein’s writing might have survived if not Toklas’s encouragement, careful retyping and organising. It seems that their life was symbiotic almost in biological sense rather than a relationship where each side would keep their own degree of autonomy. And i think it was mutual: emotionally (but not financially) Stein has depended on Alice in a similar way Alice depended on Stein. Often this symbioses bordered an unhealthy possessiveness, but it seemed to work for them.

Allegedly in an episode of jealousy to Stein’s past, Alice has changed a manuscript replacing all words ‘may’ with some other verbs as ‘May’ was the name of Stain’s fleeting ove interest well before she has met Alice. Moreover, one of the interviewees has told Katz ‘Alice had an unconscious resentment of Gertrude, and the whole life of living through another … One knew she hadn’t lived her own life.’ This person was the one of the ‘cut-offs’ so she might bare some scorn. But it seems Alice life was ‘lived wholly through another.’ So for her it was literally losing herself when Gertrude has died. Even later, according to Wade:

One visitor was stunned to realise, in the course of a ‘gossip fest’ over cigarettes and Turkish Delight, that Toklas was quoting almost verbatim from the Autobiography, reciting entire passages with an uncanny sincerity: ‘These word-for-word flights puzzled, saddened, and, in a way, even frightened me.’

It seems she has seen her past not like her own memory. Instead, her memory has become what Gertrude has written. But Stein has gone and Alice needed to find her own self anew in order to be able to live even if she did not want to search for it. She has succeeded to an extent. Partly this was through serving Stein’s posterity in any way she could. She has even converted to catholicism in order to be able to reunite with Gertrude up there. However, partly she has managed to do her own thing. She has written a cookbook that has become a bestseller:

an experiment comparable to the Autobiography in its formal playfulness: blending history, memoir, even detective story (one memorable chapter, featuring carp and pigeons, is titled ‘Murder in the Kitchen’). Despite her continued insistence that it was a mere triviality knocked off quickly for money – a crass commodity, not a work of art – the cookbook’s success had inadvertently eclipsed Stein’s at a crucial moment.

Another area where she has managed to stood her grounds was privacy. Stein’s views on posterity seemed to contradict Alice’s natural deeply ingrained desire to be a private person. When Stein was shipping her archive to Yale, Alice asked her to be more ‘selective’. But Stein said that it wasn’t for her to dictate what might affect her readers: ’facts of life make literature’. In contrast, according to Wade, as soon as Toklas came back form the hospital after Stein death, she has started to destroy their private notes-‘the thousands and thousands we had over those long happy years written to each other’.

However, she has wholeheartedly opened up to Katz. Somehow he has won her trust. But it seems he did not do much with the result of his efforts. He has never published his conversations with her or integrated them in any publication. It was a shame as Ms Toklas has expected this would promote Stein’s work. But he ended up leaving her with a new void; later he seemed to ignore her request for further cooperation. He has also revealed to her the infamous note by Stein where Alice was called ‘a prostitute type’. She seemed to take it lightly and was not at all upset. But from my perspective, it was an act of unnecessary cruelty.

Why didn't he do anything with these interviews for Alice to be able to see the results she's hoped for? Wade does not seem to have a better explanation than he was busy. In general, I wish his personality, the decisions he had to make as a researcher as well as later potential and real biographers incl Wade herself would be deeper revealed in this narrative.

But Gertrude and Alice seemed to totally overtake this narrative, and in fairness i cannot complain too much. In terms of Stein’s body of work, i feel very much ready to engage with it now even if it was not on my cards at all when i’ve started reading this biography. Also my personal little investigation has shown that in spite of Elliot’s 'concerns' Stein has palpably influenced the work of such prominent writers like Hemingway and Beckett. This is in addition to Wade’s posterity list.

As far as Alice is concerned, she was a stoic. But at the end she was practically alone Picasso’s portrait of Gertrude went to the Met, depriving Alice of a presence that felt alive to her. She shrank with age as she sank into illness and near-destitution.**. Still for me Alice’s life in a shadow seems to be more enigmatic that the life of her luminous partner.

Gabriel Josipovici might have approved on Wade’s conclusion:

There is no one answer to the enduring enigma of Gertrude Stein: her life, like her work, defies any single meaning. This is how I’ve come to see Stein, and Toklas too: as complex, flawed, confounding, funny, fascinating people.

[Simon Robs · Rating 4 out of 5]

She who is purported to have coined "The Lost Generation" moniker was also said to be famous for being famous, kinda like Kim K & likely sported ample fundament too though less shapely I'd presume.  Yet hers, Stein's booty, was the mountain of writing she produced over several decades' worth of sustained inner dialogue as she developed and refined her style unique at the forefront of modernism along with others in the early 20th century.  She was famous because she a doorkeeper to the famous.  Her writing hardly knew the light of day in her own time and while that vexed her she determined that her work would become appreciated well into the future so that her labors were stock in an unknown company that one day would pay off in well-seasoned dividends especially to those few who were keen to evaluate what it was she was at.  She claimed to be life writing aimed at not descriptors but rather the thing itself - think Heidegger's "Being and Time" or even Llansol's work.  It's ontology for literature.  I don't think I'd really enjoy it at length although I do like the psychology behind or maybe undergirding it.  To me, the biography, and this is well done, is most satisfying; I like the time period and the vibe between the great wars.  

Well, I'm leaving out the red herring that is Alice B Toklas, Stein's accomplice, lover, cook, protector, typist, the list that keeps on giving - they were a pod of peas - a rose is a rose is a rose.  If I were to read Stein, it would probably be the "Autobiography/Toklas."  For now, though, I'm satisfied to know the life.

[Hannah Jung · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stein was the most important modernist woman writing in the first half of the twentieth century. Her experimental poetry, prose and plays, as well as her extensive notebooks and letters, have been studied ever since.

She moved to Paris in her twenties, wanting to change the world. She became friends with Picasso, building up a significant collection of his work, and was a central part of the modernist and cubist artistic movement.

She was often marginalised as a modernist writer, facing misogyny and antisemitism. Contemporary writers such as Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Joyce were frustratingly lauded ahead of her. However, she was very much aware of her own genius and knew she was ahead of her time - not just in her writing but in her personal life.

Now seen as a lesbian icon, the love story of her relationship with Alice B. Toklas is central to the book. She pushed gender boundaries and what it meant to be a woman. Alice was devoted to her, as a wife and secretary, making Stein’s work possible.

The section of the book describing the Second World War in France was truly moving, as was the depiction of Alice’s life as she outlived Gertrude by twenty years.

The author questions the art of biography and the inseparability of art and life. In Stein’s case her personality is very much inextricable from her work. She is an absolutely fascinating and complex character, who would be thrilled at the legacy she has left. This is an incredibly intelligent, cleverly constructed and highly readable biography.

[Theo Logos · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stretched on a divan underneath her own Picasso portrait, Gertrude Stein was a myth and a monument, a larger than life figure whom friends and detractors viewed by turns with amusement, affection, and alarm. She was at once a celebrity and an enigma. Everyone knew she was famous, but no one was quite sure why.
From the Prologue

Her writing, full of wordplay, non sequitur, and extended passages of repetition confounded publishers, critics, and readers. Bafflement soon became suspicion. Was Stein a genius, revolutionizing a sterile literary tradition, or a self important charlatan?
From the Prologue


Before reading this excellent biography, I was mostly familiar with Gertrude Stein through her myth — the eccentric and strong willed woman whose Paris salon hosted a who’s who of 20th century artists and writers, who named the Lost Generation, and who would brook no rivals. Of course I knew of her companion, Alice B. Toklas, who was an inseparable part of the legend. What I was mostly unfamiliar with was Stein’s writing, knowing it mostly through its reputation of eccentric impenetrability, and a few famous phrases such as, “A rose is a rose is a rose,” and, “There is no there there.”

Francesca Wade illuminates Stein far beyond her legend. She examines Stein’s early adulthood as she studied under the famed Henry James and at Radcliffe and Johns Hopkins, pursuing her early ambition to study the brain and human behavior. She delves into her years spent living with her brother Leo as together they built a formidable collection of modern art. She explores Stein’s early friendships, including her first lesbian relationship as part of a doomed love triangle. And, most importantly, she focuses on the two great passions of Stein’s life — her commitment to what she considered her writing genius, and her lifelong relationship with Alice B. Toklas.

Wade dives deeply into Stein’s writings and her ambitions for them. Gertrude Stein was convinced of her own writing genius, and was distressed by how little external acknowledgment she received for it. Wade writes of her:

Stein is less a writer in the conventional sense than a philosopher of language. Words were both her medium and her subject.”

She was often included with James Joyce as a purveyor of modernism, an inclusion that angered both Joyce and Stein, who were uneasy rivals with no love lost between them. Unlike Joyce who engulfed and buried his prose under endless layers of meaning, Stein essentially played with prose, stripping it of predetermined meaning, liberating words to be free for unshackled play:

”Play, play, everyday. Play and play and play away. And then play the play you played today, the play you play everyday. Play it and play it.”

Yet Stein had difficulty in getting her writing before a wide audience, and when she did get something published, such as Geography and Plays, it was greeted with reviews such as:

Miss Stein applies cubism to defenseless prose
The Baltimore Sun

and:

A garish collection of wordy flotsam and jetsam, an olive branch to the futurist, but a puzzle to the uninitiated
Bookman

It was very likely that what first gave Alice Toklas her opening to Stein’s friendship and affections was the fact that she provided the appreciative audience for her writing that Stein could find almost nowhere else. While Toklas provided so much of practical value to Stein, taking over almost all of the mundane tasks of her life, it was as sounding board and appreciator of Stein’s literary genius that cemented her as truly invaluable. This despite the fact that Gertrude initially had a rather savage reaction to Toklas (“not even interesting enough to be evil”) or that others in her life found Toklas objectionable:

Leo’s assessment of Toklas was no more positive. “She’s a sort of all-important second fiddle,” he raged in a letter to Mabel Weeks, “a kind of abnormal vampire who gives more than she takes.”

Yet Toklas stayed and brother Leo was vanquish. Toklas became constant companion, secretary, wife, half of the first iconic lesbian couple, banisher of any who would threaten her place in Stein’s life, and eventually, for twenty years after Stein’s death, the keeper of her flame.

The true genius of Wades biography is in her handling of these two all important relationships in Gertrude Stein’s life — the unique bond she shared with Alice B. Toklas, and her absolute commitment to her mental offspring, her literary creations. The way she illuminates the one and explores the other is what makes this biography absolutely essential reading.

[Britta Böhler · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read for the BTP, Ocotfinals nonfiction
Rating to come after this round has been finalized

[rnhreads · Rating 5 out of 5]

a triumph - fascinating, structurally delicious, entirely readable. i have never raced through a biography with more joy. i stayed up til 6 am feeling very much like i was in Paris with Stein and Toklas, like my life paused to make room for me to inhabit this thoroughly enjoyable reading experience. i love tender buttons and i love this biography and i love love love gertrude stein

[♪ Kim N · Rating 3 out of 5]

Written for those already familiar with Stein's work and her Paris salon at 27 rue de Fleurus. The two parts, Life and Afterlife, contrast the way in which Stein presented herself to the world versus what was pieced together after her death from unpublished writings, private notes and the extensive interviews conducted with Alice B. Toklas by Leon Katz of Yale University. The personal details were interesting for sure, but considering Stein's lifelong pursuit of artistic recognition, it would have been nice to have more discussion of her work, more examples illustrating what made her approach both controversial and revolutionary. How is Stein's work viewed today? Can her genius be described in a way that's understandable to most people?

Whenever you get there, there is no there there.
Unfortunately, still pretty much where I am after reading this biography.

[Maddie]

AHHHH I just got an early copy in the mail!!! Thank you so very much to the publisher!!!

Sapphics with a special interest in lesbian history, rejoice!

[Clara Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved every minute of this. Essential reading for anyone interested in Stein.

[Dawn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Compared with classic biographies that march from cradle to grave and tack on a legacy chapter at the end, Wade puts the politics of memory right at the center: who controls the archive, whose versions endure, and how Stein’s image gets weaponized, defended, or dismissed across different eras. That means the book’s “subject” is almost equally Stein, Toklas, and the biographical-industrial complex that orbits them.

Most pointedly, Wade reframes Janet Malcolm’s Two Lives, a great book but one that pins Stein with Nazi sympathy during World War II. Afterlife keeps the indictment on the table but refuses to let it eclipse everything else. Wade zeroes in on how biographers, Malcolm included, have shaped Stein’s afterlife and what their lenses obscure about the writing itself.

Afterlife also draws on the Katz interviews and new archival finds—unpublished love letters, notebooks—that tweak details of Stein’s early Paris years and the evolution of her style. These don’t upend major facts, but they add real texture to how Stein’s radical writing practice grew out of her relationships and collecting.

Wade argues that Stein is “less a writer in the conventional sense than a philosopher of language,” and that treating her texts as codes to crack (or clues for a moral verdict) misses their exploratory, processual qualities. I do agree that Stein is a writer to read for pleasure—it’s not a mountain to climb. Stein’s writing experiments are continuous with her love of talk, gossip, jokes, and domestic life with Toklas. They’re sweets to be savored, juicy and new and never ever ever boring.

[Erica · Rating 4 out of 5]

A thoughtful and compelling exploration of a figure who resists easy definition. Rather than offering a straightforward biography, this book examines how Stein’s legacy was shaped after her death—revealing just how complex she was as a woman, a writer, and a cultural icon.

What stands out most is the way the author embraces contradiction. Stein emerges not as a neatly packaged literary genius, but as someone deeply human: innovative yet opaque, influential yet often misunderstood, and surrounded by relationships that were as complicated as they were devoted. The book does an excellent job of showing how her identity was constructed and reconstructed over time, sometimes by those closest to her.

Ultimately, this is a rich and nuanced portrait that goes beyond admiration to offer something more meaningful: an honest look at how legacies are built, and how even the most iconic figures remain, at their core, elusive.

[Sofia Bagdade · Rating 3 out of 5]

A comprehensive & well-researched biography exploring Stein’s lifelong commitment to art. The second half seemed to drag on and detracted focus from the intimate analysis laid out in the first half. I felt I bobbed in & out of interest, even though I wanted to feel invested in this

Personal Favorites:

“Her mind was dreaming up a cosmic map of humanity with every kind of person she had ever met represented written in a style which reflected her sense that everyone is always repeating”

“Sex and writing moved into one joyful act of creation”

[Melissa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely phenomenal! As an amateur Gertrude Stein scholar who wrote a master thesis many moons ago about Stein, I was absolutely captivated at what turned out be a bit of literary mystery as it just continued peel back many layers of Gertrude Stein and even bigger revelations about Alice B. Toklas. Now I feel motivated to re-read Stein’s works.

No matter if you have a read a lot by Stein or nothing, this autobiography divided into Stein’s life and after Stein’s death is absolutely riveting!! No wonder it was on so many best of 2025 lists!!

[Carrie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this interesting enough, though I wouldn't recommend it. I had no direct knowledge of Stein's writings which are (obviously) referred to quite often, so it would've been helpful to have had some examples and excerpts included in this otherwise very long biography about her and her work. Examples of Toklas' work would have been helpful, as well. Without it there was no source of reference to what the author was saying. Disappointing, yet still well researched and written.

[Chris Leonard · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was truly fantastic. For so long Stein was a shadowy periphery figure in the background of writers I love. Now she is at the forefront of the pantheon of people I’d love to have a dream meal with.

First coming across her poetry 2 years ago, her writing made me work to get to the meaning. It’s often confusing and incomprehensible but never boring. Somehow her life reflects this, with so much attention devoted to Toklas, who becomes to central key to getting close Stein.

The world war 2 section was particularly fascinating as two elderly Jewish lesbians in the French countryside evade arrest repeatedly while still maintaining afternoon tea sessions because of everyday antifascist resistance from the locals. Their situation felt distressing yet hopeful.

Toklas feels vindicated in this, given proper space to tell her own story, and Stein’s, in her own words. I loved learning about her adventures after Stein as she worked tirelessly to secure her partner’s legacy.

There is an atmosphere of full-circleness in this biography. Wade has made me mourn Stein and feel grateful for the work both writers have done. Stein’s life and writing feels so relevant to today’s issues and I wish it could be spread more and more.

[L & J Ross · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fascinating, thoughtful and well written biography of the very complex and complicated poet, playwright and author, Gertrude Stein. The biography is well laid out, beginning with her early life and culminating in what transpired after her death at age 72. The book details not only the complicated relationship with her long time companion and lover, Alice, but also her early relationship with various close female friends, artists such as Picasso, her life in France, her support for various French public officials who were later found to be Nazi collaborators, among others. The book includes a detailed index as well as source notes.
My thanks to the author and publishers and Goodreads for providing an ARC in exchange for my honest review.

[Nicholas During · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best biography I've read. A fascinating story; beautifully formed and executed; and clearly meticulously researched—this book goes a long way to reaffirming Stein's role in the artistic canon, but it's also just a lot of fun to read.

[Michael Paquette · Rating 5 out of 5]

A thorough examination of the extraordinarily complex and controversial life of Gertude Stein. This book furthers the story by looking at the writing and conversations of Alice B. Toklas who was her fifty year companion. The book examines how Stein used her medical training and psychological studies to compose works that illuminate the individual above all even in the scope of the world they live in. In her first book, which she considered her greatest work, The Making of Americans, Stein used a new and distinctive style that was laser focused on the individual that made up the collective narrative of America. She looked at historical figures and obscure citizens and their thoughts, emotions and strengths. She wrote this work with no regard for punctuation or grammar allowing the words alone to capture the reader. Her words evoked a staccato vibration almost like syncopated jazz and influenced many musicians including the brilliant John Cage. This book further examines the vast amount of material donated to the Yale library, scraps, notebooks, letters, lists, notations on art that would be poured over by scholars. The book gives us the story of Carl Van Vechten and Leon Katz who spent nearly half of their lives interviewing Alice Toklas and urging her to write her memoirs. Toklas would grace the world with a reknown cookbook as well as two distinctive autobiographies despite the fact that Stein insisted throughout their relationship that Toklas couldn't write at all. The amazing relationship between these two lovers is explored and explained in numerous variations along the path of this book. Stein's magnificent Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, which is really an autobiography of herself through the eyes of Toklas is given a thorough examination including its reception and its controversial subject matter. Stein's efforts to preserve and protect her incredibly art collection from the Nazis as a Jew during wartime is beautifully told. Stein's works influenced countless writers and she turned literature into art and gave society an indelible appreciation for art in the avant garde. The works of art that belonged to her friends in 1920s Paris that would become Stein's collection and the financial support that kept Stein, and later Toklas, afloat through grim times. These works are now collected in the Baltimore Museum, the MOMA in NY and the San Francisco Museum of Art.

The poet John Ashberry in his review of the MOMA show stated that we are reminded that the twentieth century, whatever elsce it may be, is the century of Matisse, Picasso and Gertrude Stein. Stein's biggest success other than her autobiography may be her opera, Four Saints in Three Acts. This success is given a thorough review and backstory which illuminates the humor and pathos of Stein's works. The hidden manuscripts that were pored over by Van Vechten and Katz revealed two more operas, one of which was posthumously staged to critical acclaim. Another powerful moment is the struggle that Van Vechteen and Katz went through to get Toklas to give permission for the publication of Stein's early work Q. E. D. which would become the controversial story of her early explorations of love affairs with Annette Rosenshine and May Bookstaver. These works Stein had promised Toklas would never be printed but through the efforts of these researchers Toklas permitted and supported their publication. Stein's relationships with James Joyce, Ernest Hemmingway, Virgil Thomson, Pablo Picasso, Sylvia Beach, Bernard Fay and her brothers Michael and Leo are given a thorough study and her life and after life is well delivered.

The poet Frank O'Hara wrote a term paper at Harvard about The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and called it "one of the most interesting things I have ever read by anyone." This biography is one of the finest of its kind I have ever read about any literary figure alongside Justin Kaplan's Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain and his Walt Whitman: A Life written about a decade later. Francesca Wade has given us a biogrphy that is an historic masterpiece.

[Mimi Pockross · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is not for the light-hearted. But if one likes a thoroughly researched biography that is in no way judgmental, there is no other biography that I have ever read where the author does a better job than Francesca Wade. The problem for me is that I have never been much of a Gertrude Stein admirer. I only read the book because it was singled out on a PBS segment about the best books of the year. However, I'm glad I read this chronology of the life of Gertrude Stein and her lifetime partner Alice B. Toklas. There are few takeaways. The author merely chronicles two lives well lived and how they personified the importance of creating a vibrant existence through the arts, how they mingled with the likes of Picasso and Hemingway but also with the masses once they settled in France. The most amazing part to me was how they lived through Hitler's reign during World War II, sometimes giving up their principles to assure their survival. In the end, I'm not one who really likes either Gertrude or Alice or their relationship with one another. I am now better educated on why they became an important part of both American culture and that of other cultures as well. I'm glad I had a chance to learn this.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book. Very important for those with an interest in Gertrude Stein, and a fine introduction for those who might be curious to know about her life (part one) and what the author calls her "afterlife" (part two) -- that is, how her work was preserved until it could be rediscovered and championed by new generations of readers, scholars, and artists across genres (drama, poetry) and disciplines (music, dance, visual and performance arts).

For years, I had read about Leon Katz, who interviewed Alice Toklas after Stein's death, and was supposedly working on a book that would have big revelations. He died in 2017 without ever publishing his book, but this author has gone into the archives to report on his work, and it is fascinating. Beyond that, she seems to have gone to every possible archive that has Stein and Stein-related material, so in just 384 pages she has given us a very thorough account full of powerful insights as well as information I never knew until now, despite my obsessive reading of all things Stein and Toklas that I could get my hands on. If you are an obsessive Stein nut like me, you might enjoy the first part, but you will really enjoy the second part, which goes into how Stein's work was safeguarded and then discovered and championed by new generations. It's just lovely stuff! Highly recommended!

P.S. Due to sexism, there are many who don't appreciate Stein's genius, but this book makes me happy because it shows how many people have recognized her importance and been inspired to do their own great work thanks to Stein paving the way. This book also makes clear how essential Toklas was to Stein's work, and chronicles the sacrifices she made to ensure Stein's work would eventually find its audience.

[Scout Riches · Rating 3 out of 5]

Freak

[Lisa Kopicki · Rating 3 out of 5]

Actually a 3.5. Well written. However while I do understand Stein's cultural significance, I found her to be an unsimpathetic character.

[Trina · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you’re interested in Gertrude Stein, her writing and her life in France with Toklas, and especially if you’re interested in recent scholars’ take on Stein, this is fascinating.

[Maddie Cross · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stein fans will like this. Gossip hounds will devour this. Anyone who has watched a friend (fail to adequately) navigate a toxic lesbian relationship will feel seen by this

[Sydney · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thanks to NetGalley and Scribner for the eARC!

This was such a well done biography. I learned so much about Stein! I remember reading my first Stein book for my Theory class in grad school. I didn't get it. I'm still not sure I get it. But I understand her process now.
I almost feel like this was a biography of both Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas. Which, in general, makes sense because they were so entwined in life.
I also like that Wade didn't shy away from the less glamorous aspects of Stein's life (even the rumors).
Wade definitely made me want to try Gertrude Stein's writing again!

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

My thanks to NetGalley and Scribner for an advance copy of this book that serves as both a biography and a literary investigation into an author, their life, the life they created, and the persona they presented to the world, a persona even furthered after death.

In college I took a class in experimental literature with a professor who at the time I thought was a little bit of a jerk. Looking back I realize he had tenure, and will some would say he didn't care about teaching, I now know he didn't have to. The lectures were the same as they were the year before, probably hadn't changed since the college had removed the paddling board for unruly students. I wish I could say I noticed the lack of women, even minorities in the syllabus, but I was unaware of the world in many ways. One young woman did ask and began a discussion on Gertrude Stein, teaching me more in her five minutes than I learned that semester. Probably my whole academic career. I also learned a salon is far different from a place where one gets their hair fashioned, and while there is a lot of alcohol, is not a saloon. Years later at a book sale I cam across a boxed set of Gertrude Stein from Australia. The price, and the uniqueness, cheap and really a nice book collection, made me pick it up, and I am so glad. The work was everything the woman from my class said, different, ahead of its time, familiar in some cases, but always unique. Just like Stein, herself, which is captured perfectly in this book. Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade is not only a biography but a forensic study of a person who crafted much of her public persona, ably assisted by her wife and companion, with an aim at posterity, creating works that still seem fresh, new and different today.

The book begins with a look at young Gertrude, and her family. Stein was a precocious child, one that loved learning, but learning on her own terms. Stein was attached to her brother as both a companion and a competitor, traveling East where he went to school, and going to college herself with an interest in psychology. This idea petered out, by Europe was calling, spending time with her brother, and more by herself living in England and reading all the great books she could find in the libraries. Paris was next, sharing a room again with her brother, investing in art, and opening her house up to the creative people that filled the city. Stein posed for a young Picasso, feed a young Ernest Hemingway collected early art works, and inspired movements. All this time Stein was writing, dealing with the lack of attention a woman in any arts has, dealing with World Wars, and finding love for the first time with Alice B. Toklas, her companion, her wife, and her image maker after Stein died.

I can go one, but the book is so good that even people familiar with the life of Stein will be riveted. Wade is a very good author, empathetic to her subject, but not beholden. Stein is called out on many things, her ways to just end relationships, a bit of problems with the truth, et al. Wade is also a very good researcher finding lost works in old achieves, digging through papers tucked away, and revealing quite a lot about the Stein, and Toklas. Stein was an early influencer, creating art movements, brining authors to the forefront, and more importantly pushing her own brand to the populace. Wade really has created a fascinating book that tells so much about a character who really should be more celebrated. A book that revealed so much on each page.

Those familiar with Stein will enjoy this, and those new to Stein will have a lot of reading to do later. I know I am going to have to find that collection I bought so many years ago, and look through it again. I know I am going to enjoy it. This was my first book by Francesca Wade, I will have to read more.

[Jeff]

As a huge fan of Stein’s writing, I have read many books about her life. As Francesca Wade notes, Some of these are hagiographies, intended to paint her as a genius, and basically ignoring her flaws. Stein has also had plenty of detractors, both during and after her lifetime. Wade manages to find a successful middle ground, praising Stein’s achievements while simultaneously facing her numerous problems head on. Considering that Stein’s fame grew considerably after her death, partly because so little of her work was available in print during her lifetime, and partly because the rise of an open LGBTQ community celebrated her for both giving voice to lesbian erotica and for her long relationship with Alice B. Toklas. Wade therefore divides her study into two parts, the story of Stein’s life, and then an account of her rise to fame after her death. Since I already know so much about Stein and her various circles (having read her work and about her for a very long time), I don’t know if the Stein novice should begin with Wade, but I think this may be the best overall assessment of Stein and her influences available. Depending on the reader’s interest, they might prefer to start with something like “Charmed Circle” or “Gertrude Stein in Pieces” but Wade has read both of those, and includes their insights in her book. So having just said this book may be the best overall book about Stein, let me nitpick two tiny details, which jumped out because Wade gets most everything else right. On p. 324, Wade speaks of “a nostalgic pianola” playing the Ballet mechanique of George Anteuil. His name is George Antheil, and nobody who has actually heard the percussive, dissonant hammering of his Ballet mechanique would ever describe it as “nostalgic.” The other oops comes in Wade’s discussion of Something Else press, which helped bring Stein’s work to a broader audience in the 1960s. Wade calls Dick Higgins a “mustached filmmaker,” which seems to me a slightly condescending characterization of one of the mid-century’s most protean and interdisciplinary artists. She might have called him a composer, an author, a book artist, a playwright, a polymath, or any number of more accurate designations. I own a first edition of the Something Else press edition of Stein’s The Making of Americans, so call me protective. “Filmmaker” is about the last thing I would call Dick Higgins. Other than these two small lapses, Wade’s book has the most “there” of any Stein study around.

[R Davies · Rating 5 out of 5]

A delightfully well written biography that celebrates the lives of Stein and also Toklas, even if the latter would presumably loathe such attention. Set out in two parts, the first part draws out Stein's life, and her development as a writer, as well as her battles to be recognised as a writer in her own right, and not just a 'name' associated with more widely recognised figures like Joyce and Picasso. It also draws on the impact of her relationship with Alice Toklas, and how their life and identity almost merges as one as time marches on. Part two, following Stein's death then looks at Toklas' dealing with the responsibility of ensuring Stein's work receives its due as she sees it , trying to manage the legacy, and trusting a select few individuals to draw out Stein's writing and bring it to a wider audience, one more receptive to her style than her contemporaries where whilst she was alive.

It is a deeply humane book, but one that never threatens to feel overly hagiographic towards its subjects. The ambivalence felt towards the pair by peers and critics, as well as their respective personalities are revealed to the reader subtly, warts and all. Stein's encompassing desire to be recognised, and her snobbery or dickishness towards people she didn't sufficiently respect her or give her due, and Toklas' almost dangerously obsessive seeming desire to possess Stein entirely, to ward off negative influences, cutting out bemused writers and other people for perceived slights, as well as her extreme desire to efface herself from the Stein narrative... it's all evident in the writing.

But it is compassionately done and contextualised by the challenges of being a lesbian couple when one could never actually be out about such a relationships. One wonders how their relationship, with the wider world as much as anything would have differed had they lived in more enlightened times.

[Ellen · Rating 5 out of 5]

On page 372 the author states “Biography, like detective fiction, is a precarious structure; some mysteries must remain unresolved.” That may be so.

One of those mysteries might be why Gertrude Stein did not leave a lifetime interest in her portrait by Picasso to Alice Toklas, as she did with the rest of her art collection. I found the scene (p. 213) where Toklas recalls when Picasso came to say goodbye to his portrait of Gertrude after her death particularly moving. After staring at the portrait for “quite a few minutes” he said “Neither you nor I will ever see it again.” Later that day the portrait went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Besides containing charming and touching anecdotes, this is an exquisite book, covering a great deal of information with compassion, insight, and a clear understanding of the complexities of its extraordinary subject.

Not only is the writing interesting and informative, often juggling multiple viewpoints, but it is organized in a superlative way.

If for nothing else I would give this book five stars for its notes (which unfortunately are not numbered within the text — a matter I hope is corrected in future printings), but also for its index, which I consider an indispensable part of any good history or biography, and also for its extensive bibliography and the list crediting the illustrations. All bases are covered!

This is definitely the best organized and well written book I have seen maybe ever!
If you have any interest in Gertrude Stein, I cannot recommend this book highly enough.

Stein’s life and writing have been of interest to me for over 60 years. I started reading her work when I was in High School, and still have the catalog from the MoMA exhibit of the Stein family’s art collection!

Thank you to the author for your exceptional scholarship and ability.

[W.S. Luk · Rating 4 out of 5]

Despite my passion for modernist writers, my knowledge of Gertrude Stein was a fragmentary one: I'd read fragments of her work, and knew her by reputation from A Moveable Feast and stories of her relationships with Cezanne and Picasso. Wade's book fills that gap of knowledge helpfully, detailing not only Stein's life but also the posthumous reception of her work. Her well-paced prose shines light on Stein's literary innovations, relationship with Alice B. Toklas, and process of self-promotion as an author, as well as her controversial ties to Vichy France, with Wade arguing that while Stein did hold a "lingering affection" for Marshal Pétain, accusations of collaborationism have been overstated by modern commentators placing her on the same footing as pro-Fascist modernists like Ezra Pound. It's an enlightening look at a neglected modernist writer and the qualities that made her so compelling and controversial.

That said, I felt that the book's pace flagged a little in the latter half, which, after Stein's death, is primarily devoted to the wranglings of commentators and biographers studying Stein's papers and developing her posthumous reputation. I'd also have liked to see Wade examine slightly longer extracts of Stein's writings, as her close analysis of Stein's work primarily involves discussing brief quotations from texts like Tender Buttons, an approach which sometimes felt too cursory.