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.
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
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
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, 1959.
Stang, Sondra J., editor. “Introduction and Editorial Materials”. The Ford Madox Ford Reader, Carcanet, 1986, p. various pages.
200
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, 1996.
371-3
Its political interests were served by enlightened...
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...
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, 1983, 2 vols.
314
Parker, Peter, editor. A Reader’s Guide to Twentieth-Century Writers. Oxford University Press, 1996.
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, 1996.
231
Publishing
Laura Riding
LR
published poems, essays, and a review in 1927-8 in transition, the little magazine produced in Paris by Eugene
and Maria Jolas
and Elliot Paul
. Her critical essay here on Gertrude Stein
was...
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...
Mathews, Jackson, and Maurice Saillet. Sylvia Beach 1887-1962. Mercure de France, 1963.
cover and prelims
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, 1971.
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...
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...
Residence
Ezra Pound
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, 1999, pp. xvii - xxxi; 1.
xxi-xxii
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
4
Textual Features
Fleur Adcock
She relates how in reading for the anthology she made discoveries and underwent conversions—one result of which had to be the jettisoning of some early choices whose phantoms later, for her, haunted the volume...
