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.
Rather than being a historical opus about life in the heyday of Paris, this is an engaging mixture filled with sketchy and witty recollections. When William Bradley
and Alfred Knopf
approached SB
more than...
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
Occupation
Natalie Clifford Barney
Gertrude Stein
was the featured writer at a gathering of the Académie des Femmes
at NCB
's salon. The programme included an introduction by Mina Loy
, Barney's French translations of The Making of Americans...
Occupation
Natalie Clifford Barney
In a letter to Gertrude Stein
written in December 1926, NCB
explains: The other night . . . I realized how little the French femmes de lettres know of English and Americans and vice versa...
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
Stang, Sondra J., editor. “Introduction and Editorial Materials”. The Ford Madox Ford Reader, Carcanet, p. various pages.
200
Occupation
Sylvia Beach
This was the first American bookstore in Paris. It became a focal point of French and American literary activities. In the summer of 1921 the bookstore moved to 12 rue de l'Odéon.
Beach, Sylvia. Shakespeare and Company. Harcourt, Brace.
60
For...
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...
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...
Birch, Sarah. Christine Brooke-Rose and Contemporary Fiction. Clarendon Press.
228
Her own summary of her career, however, was that she tried...
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.
