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 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 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
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...
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
Textual Production
Natalie Clifford Barney
NCB
wrote a preface for Gertrude Stein
's As Fine as Melanctha, which was published later that year, eight years after Stein's death.
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
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...
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...
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...
Marek, Jayne E. Women Editing Modernism: "Little" Magazines & Literary History. University Press of Kentucky.
118-20
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...