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.
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...
Textual Features
Edith Sitwell
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...
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...
The preface to Poems: A Joking Word explains the title like this. Poems means jokingly the surprisingness of doom. Poems is a joking word to say that doom is surprising enough for there to be...
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 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, 2010.
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...
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.
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...
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, 1985, p. xv - lxxix.
lxxiii
Textual Production
Mina Loy
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, 1996.
