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 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
Literary responses
Marie Belloc Lowndes
Child
wrote that this was a murder story but no mere murder story because MBL
had chosen not to set the reader a puzzle but to probe the detail of characters whose guilt was already...
Literary responses
Marie Belloc Lowndes
This was one of the two books by MBL
which was recommended to Ernest Hemingway
by Gertrude Stein
. (He too thought it was about Jack the Ripper.)
Lowndes, Marie Belloc. Diaries and Letters of Marie Belloc Lowndes, 1911-1947. Editor Marques, Susan Lowndes, Chatto and Windus.
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
Wyndham Lewis
WL
privately published The Apes of God, a satire attacking several writers of the 1920s, including Gertrude Stein
, the Bloomsbury Group, and the Osbert SitwellSitwell
s.
Oldsey, Bernard Stanley, editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 15. Gale Research.
314
Parker, Peter, editor. A Reader’s Guide to Twentieth-Century Writers. Oxford University Press.
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Wyndham Lewis
He examines the work of Gertrude Stein
(whom he counsels to get out of english) and popular writer Anita Loos
(Gentlemen Prefer Blondes), as well as Bergson
, Einstein
, Pound
, Joyce
, and others.
Oldsey, Bernard Stanley, editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 15. Gale Research.
313
Textual Features
Wyndham Lewis
Another essay, The Dumb Ox, criticizes Hemingway
, in part by stressing his debt to Gertrude Stein
: This brilliant Jewish lady has made a clown of him by teaching Ernest Hemingway her baby-talk...
Friends, Associates
Nina Hamnett
In Paris NH
quickly re-acquainted herself with old friends and met new ones, re-establishing her presence at the popular cafés. She re-connected with Marie Wassilieff
, Zadkine
, Brancusi
, Aleister Crowley
, and others...
Friends, Associates
H. D.
In the 1920s, while HD and Bryher
were living rootlessly, sometimes in London, sometimes in Europe, HD's list of acquaintances grew to include Gertrude Stein
, Alice B. Toklas
, Ernest Hemingway
, James Joyce
Textual Production
H. D.
During 1927-33 HD contributed to the avant-garde, influential film magazine Close Up: Devoted to the Art of Films, which Bryher
funded and of which Kenneth Macpherson
was the official editor. It had a temperate...
Stang, Sondra J., editor. “Introduction and Editorial Materials”. The Ford Madox Ford Reader, Carcanet, p. various pages.
200
Occupation
Gustave Flaubert
One of the great practioners of literary realism, he shifted the European novel significantly towards naturalism. His influence ranged far, from literary friends such as Émile Zola
to writers in English, including Mary Elizabeth Braddon