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.
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...
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...
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.
4
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...
Friends, Associates
Lady Ottoline Morrell
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
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.
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
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...
Timeline
No timeline events available.
Texts
Stein, Gertrude. The Geographical History of America. Random House, 1936.
Stein, Gertrude. The Geographical History of America. University Microfilms, 1969.
Stein, Gertrude. The Making of Americans. Contact Editions, 1925.
Stein, Gertrude et al. The Making of Americans. Dalkey Archive Press, 1995.
Stein, Gertrude et al. The Mother of Us All. Music Press, 1947.
Stein, Gertrude, and Clement Hurd. The World is Round. W. R. Scott, 1939.
Stein, Gertrude. Things As They Are. Banyan Press, 1950.
Stein, Gertrude. Three Lives. Grafton Press, 1909.
Stein, Gertrude, and Janet Flanner. Two: Gertrude Stein and Her Brother. Yale University Press, 1951.
Stein, Gertrude. Wars I Have Seen. Random House, 1945.
Stein, Gertrude et al. Writings 1903-1932. Library of America, 1998.
Stein, Gertrude et al. Writings 1932-1948. Library of America, 1998.
