Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Gertrude Stein
-
Standard Name: Stein, Gertrude
Birth Name: Gertrude Stein
Nickname: Altrude
Nickname: Sybil of Montparnasse
Gertrude Stein
concerned herself with problems of identity, knowledge, consciousness, and language. In a period of modernist experiment, she became famous as a radically innovative avant-gardist. Her experimental imagination played around with the generic requirements of many forms—short stories, detective stories, novellas, literary portraits, poems, autobiographies, critical essays, operas, plays, and war reminiscences. This often non-referential work is opaque and resistant to interpretation. An expatriate for virtually all of her writing career and of the first half of the twentieth century, living largely in Paris (though in French villages during the Second World War), she marked her writing as deeply American. In the years between the wars she hosted her legendary salon at 27 rue de Fleurus, where, after 1910, she lived with her life partner, Alice B. Toklas
. With her brother Leo
, Stein was an early collector and promoter of modern, especially cubist, painting.
Particular admirers of her work included Gertrude Stein
, who recommended her to Ernest Hemingway
.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Publishing
Mina Loy
The transatlantic review published the first section of ML
's letter about the writings of Gertrude Stein
.
Loy, Mina. “Introduction and Notes”. The Lost Lunar Baedeker, edited by Roger L. Conover, Farrar, Straus, Giroux.
231
Textual Production
Mina Loy
ML
delivered an informal lecture on Gertrude Stein
at Natalie Barney
's Académie des femmes.
Loy, Mina. “Introduction and Time-Table”. The Last Lunar Baedeker, edited by Roger L. Conover, Carcanet, p. xv - lxxix.
lxxiii
Friends, Associates
Mina Loy
ML
first met Leo
and Gertrude Stein
and Alice Toklas
at Mabel Dodge
's Florence salon. Mina's and Gertrude's friendship continued for many years, and Mina wrote and spoke about Stein's writing in the 1920s...
Friends, Associates
Mina Loy
ML
was now at the centre of the Parisian expatriate literary community, and she renewed her friendships with Gertrude Stein
and Djuna Barnes
.
Burke, Carolyn. Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy. Farrar, Straus, Giroux.
The letter included as its epigraph ML
's poem about Stein
in which she calls her Curie
/ of the laboratory / of vocabulary.
Loy, Mina. The Lost Lunar Baedeker. Editor Conover, Roger L., Farrar, Straus, Giroux.
94
Education
Carson McCullers
About this time she was reading voraciously: theBrontësisters
, Russian novelists and dramatists, and British and American modernists including Katherine Mansfield
and Gertrude Stein
. Isak Dinesen
was to come later.
Carr, Virginia Spencer. The Lonely Hunter: A Biography of Carson McCullers. Doubleday and Co. Inc.
33
Dews, Carlos L., and Carson McCullers. “Chronology and Notes”. Complete Novels, Library of America, Literary Classics of the United States, pp. 807-27.
808
Friends, Associates
Hope Mirrlees
While living in Paris, Mirrlees and Harrison entertained visitors who included HM
's mother
(widowed in 1924), and Virginia
and Leonard Woolf
.
Robinson, Annabel. The Life and Work of Jane Ellen Harrison. Oxford University Press.
Her tour of the city with Chadbourne included the studios of Matisse
and Picasso
(in Montmartre), and Gertrude
's and Leo Stein
's collection of contemporary paintings.
Seymour, Miranda. Ottoline Morrell: Life on the Grand Scale. Farrar Straus Giroux.
88
Textual Production
Tillie Olsen
By the time she entered high school she was keeping a journal in assorted and undated notebooks containing poems, bits of stories, drafts of letters, and reflections.
Reid, Panthea. Tillie Olsen: One Woman, Many Riddles. Rutgers University Press.
37
One year into high school she began...
Publishing
Tillie Olsen
Tillie Lerner, later TO
, was nineteen when she began drafting a novel, and writing it was an element in her life for thirty years. In 1934 Bennett Cerf
and Donald Klopfer
, founders of...
Residence
Ezra Pound
EP
lived in Paris, where he formed associations with many other expatriate writers including Gertrude Stein
, Ernest Hemingway
, and Natalie Barney
.
Nadel, Ira Bruce, editor. “Chronology; Introduction”. The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound, Cambridge University Press, pp. xvii - xxxi; 1.
xxi-xxii
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
After a visit to Gertrude Stein
and Alice B. Toklas
in the French Alps, LR
and Robert Graves
arrived on the island of Mallorca, where they settled in the village of Deyá in a...