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.
AC
's starting-point is the poem about Geryon by the Greek lyric poet Stesichoros
or Stesichorus, whose surviving writings are so gnomic and fragmentary that every statement about them remains hesitant and uncertain. Stesichoros is...
Textual Features
Anne Carson
Like Nox, this text challenges normal book structure by consisting of a box containing twelve separate booklets, which can therefore be read in any order. Their material embraces a range of periods, settings, and...
Leisure and Society
Leonora Carrington
The street in which LC
and Ernst lived was also occupied by such authors as Gertrude Stein
and Natalie Barney
at various times in the early twentieth century.
Family and Intimate relationships
Bryher
Though emotionally empty, the marriage was artistically productive. Most significantly, Bryher's introductions and family funds allowed McAlmon to establish his influential press, Contact Editions
. Thus, Bryher's money and social connections enabled the publication of...
Marek, Jayne E. Women Editing Modernism: "Little" Magazines & Literary History. University Press of Kentucky.
118-20
Reception
Rhoda Broughton
In a lamentable
Lowndes, Marie Belloc. Diaries and Letters of Marie Belloc Lowndes, 1911-1947. Editor Marques, Susan Lowndes, Chatto and Windus.
217
article on the death of Virginia Woolf
, Hugh Walpole
accused literary ladies of acting like priestesses engaged in throwing fragrant incense on their own altars. The first name he mentions...
Mathews, Jackson, and Maurice Saillet. Sylvia Beach 1887-1962. Mercure de France.
cover and prelims
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.
Beach, Sylvia. Shakespeare and Company. Harcourt, Brace.
22, 26-7
With the loyal support of French literary figures such as Valery Larbaud
Publishing
Sylvia Beach
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...
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...
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.
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...
Friends, Associates
Natalie Clifford Barney
Despite their common pursuits, NCB
and Gertrude Stein
did not become acquainted until 1926, when Barney cultivated Stein's friendship. The women gradually began to exchange visits and to share guests at their salons. By 1939...
