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.
They had help from Vyvyan Richards
(who had formerly planned to set up a printing press with his close friend T. E. Lawrence
), which was needed since neither had much experience with hand-presses. They...
Friends, Associates
Laura Riding
Graves and Riding were touchy as friends, between their sense of literary mission (they saw Graves's biography of T. E. Lawrence
as a somewhat demeaning potboiler, not part of his real work at all) and...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Laura Riding
Although this volume appeared later, its second chapter was the root of the concluding chapter of A Survey of Modernist Poetry. Gertrude Stein
is a test case here: T. S. Eliot
is hauled over...
Friedmann, Elizabeth. A Mannered Grace. Persea Books.
114
LR
sets out to free the poet from the restrictions imposed by the synthetic or collective notion...
Literary responses
Laura Riding
Gertrude Stein
, to whom she sent a copy, responded, the poetry is good poetry.
Friedmann, Elizabeth. A Mannered Grace. Persea Books.
122
Publishing
Laura Riding
LR
published poems, essays, and a review in 1927-8 in transition, the little magazine produced in Paris by Eugene
and Maria Jolas
and Elliot Paul
. Her critical essay here on Gertrude Stein
was...
Textual Features
Laura Riding
The preface to Poems: A Joking Word explains the title like this. Poems means jokingly the surprisingness of doom. Poems is a joking word to say that doom is surprising enough for there to be...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Laura Riding
14A, designed to make money (primarily for Ellidge) is a fictionalization, farcical rather than tragic, of the events around Riding's suicide attempt. Actual people are portrayed with satirical gusto: for instance, Amelia, whose identity...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Laura Riding
The wide range of topics discussed includes aspects of language and literature, the harmful effects of structuralism and other science-inspired approaches to language, what Riding takes to be the special active unselfishness of women, issues...
Textual Features
Edith Sitwell
The English edition appeared the following year. Her choice for inclusion is, as usual, idiosyncratic. She begins well before Chaucer
, with anonymous early religious poems in which may be heard, she writes, the creaking...
Textual Production
Edith Sitwell
John Lehmann
and Derek Parker
had published an earlier collection with the same title in 1970, but it was less valuable than it could have been because Edith's surviving brother, Sacheverell, decreed that all family...
Friends, Associates
Edith Sitwell
By 1919 ES
was also friendly with Arnold Bennett
and his wife Marguerite
. Wyndham Lewis
became a great friend, did many drawings of her, and demonstrated a sexual interest in her as well, which...
Family and Intimate relationships
Edith Sitwell
She called him that tragic, haunted, and noble artist—one of the most generous human beings I have ever known.
Sitwell, Edith. Taken Care Of: An Autobiography. Hutchinson.
137
She was forty and Pavlik was twenty-nine when they met at the home of Gertrude Stein
Friends, Associates
Edith Sitwell
In Paris ES
frequented Sylvia Beach
's bookshop. She saw more than before of Gertrude Stein
, whom she liked for her personal qualities but called the last writer whom any other writer in the...
Intertextuality and Influence
Edith Sitwell
ES
loved Christina Rossetti
from her childhood, and later thoroughly admired Gertrude Stein
. As a young woman, however, she believed: Women's poetry, with the exception of Sappho
. . . and Goblin MarketChristina Rossetti
and...
