Gertrude Stein

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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.
Black and white photo of Gertude Stein taken by Carl Van Vechten in early 1935. She is standing in front of an American flag, wearing a dark jacket and pale scarf.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Occupation Virginia Woolf
The Press, which began as therapy and for the purpose of publishing the works of its owners, grew into a major engine of modern culture and thought.
Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. Chatto and Windus.
371-3
Its political interests were served by enlightened...
Friends, Associates Virginia Woolf
By the time of the move to Tavistock Square, VW began to socialize more than she had in years. She circulated with Bloomsbury familiars and (re)acquainted herself with Rebecca West , Rose Macaulay ,...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Jeanette Winterson
In these essays JW defends the power and importance of art, and the necessity of difficult art, discusses the works of Virginia Woolf , T. S. Eliot , and Gertrude Stein , and explores her...
Textual Features Stevie Smith
This highly unusual novel takes the form of a disconnected journal by a publisher's secretary named Pompey, an alienated but irrepressible member of the disregarded female work-force, who is clearly an alter-ego for SS ...
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...
Residence Laura Riding
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...
Occupation Laura Riding
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...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Laura Riding
The volume was, says Elizabeth Friedmann , largely a response to the ideas of Wyndham Lewis .
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...

Timeline

1925: The Black US singer Josephine Baker, aged...

Building item

1925

The Black US singer Josephine Baker , aged nineteen, met with phenomenal success in Paris; she was seen as exemplifying the Jazz Age on one hand and a new racial consciousness on the other.

Texts

Stein, Gertrude, and Carl Van Vechten. A Novel of Thank You. Yale University Press, 1958.
Stein, Gertrude. “A Stein Song”. Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein, edited by Carl Van Vechten, Random House, 1946, p. ix - xv.
Stein, Gertrude. Before the Flowers of Friendship Faded Friendship Faded. Plain Edition, 1931.
Stein, Gertrude. Brewsie and Willie. Random House, 1946.
Stein, Gertrude. Composition as Explanation. Hogarth Press, 1926.
Stein, Gertrude. Everybody’s Autobiography. Random House, 1937.
Stein, Gertrude, and Leon Katz. Fernhurst, Q.E.D., and Other Early Writings. Liveright, 1971.
Barney, Natalie Clifford, and Gertrude Stein. “Foreword”. As Fine as Melanctha, Yale University Press, 1954, p. vii - xix.
Stein, Gertrude et al. Four Saints in Three Acts. Random House, 1934.
Stein, Gertrude, and Sherwood Anderson. Geography and Plays. Four Seas Press, 1922.
Stein, Gertrude. “How Many Acts Are There In It?”. Last Operas and Plays, edited by Carl Van Vechten, Rinehart, 1949, p. vii - xix.
Stein, Gertrude. Ida. Random House, 1941.
Stein, Gertrude. Last Operas and Plays. Editor Van Vechten, Carl, Rinehart, 1949.
Stein, Gertrude, and Elizabeth Sprigge. Look at Me Now and Here I Am: Writings and Lectures: 1909-1945. Editor Meyerowitz, Patricia, Penguin, 1971.
Stein, Gertrude. Matisse Picasso and Gertrude Stein. Plain Edition, 1933.
Stein, Gertrude. Matisse, Picasso, and Gertrude Stein. Something Else Press, 1972.
Stein, Gertrude, and Leon Solomons. “Normal Motor Automatism”. Harvard Psychological Review, Harvard University Press.
Stein, Gertrude. Paris France. Scribner, 1940.
Stein, Gertrude. Picasso. Floury, 1938.
Stein, Gertrude. Portraits and Prayers. Random House, 1934.
Stein, Gertrude. Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein. Editor Van Vechten, Carl, Random House, 1946.
Stein, Gertrude, and Donald Sutherland. Stanzas in Meditation. Yale University Press, 1956.
Stein, Gertrude. Tender Buttons. Claire Marie, 1914.
Stein, Gertrude. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Harcourt, Brace, 1933.
Stein, Gertrude. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Vintage Books, 1990.