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An Afterlife
by Francesca Wade
Drawing on never-before-seen interviews, a richly researched, sweeping examination of one of the most influential and mythologized literary figures of the 20th century and her partner's emergence from the shadows after her death, in the decades-long fight to ensure her legacy.
Gertrude Stein's salon at 27 rue de Fleurus in the 6th arrondissement of Paris is the stuff of literary legend. Many have tried to capture the spirit and glamour of the place that once entertained and fostered the likes of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Pablo Picasso, and Henri Matisse, but perhaps none as determinedly, and self-consciously, as Stein herself. In this new biography of the polarizing, trailblazing author, collector, salonnière, and tastemaker, Francesca Wade rescues Stein from the tangle of contradictions that has characterized her legacy, expertly presenting us with this towering literary figure as we've never seen her before.
A genius to her admirers, a charlatan to her detractors, Stein achieved international celebrity in 1933 with her bestselling memoir, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, written in the voice of her devoted partner—a triumph which, ironically, only drew attention away from the avant-garde poetry she called her "real" writing. After Stein's death in 1946, Alice B. Toklas made it her mission to shepherd all of Stein's unpublished writing into print, all the while negotiating her own fraught role in the complex mythology they had built together. The biographers who flocked to Stein's newly opened archive found a surprising trove of secrets which would change Stein's image forever: a forgotten novel, a cache of love letters, and a series of notebooks which shed entirely new light on her early years in Paris.
Pushing beyond the conventions of literary biography, Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife is a bold, innovative examination of the nature of legacy and memory itself, in which Wade uncovers the origins of Stein's radical writing and reveals new depths to the storied relationship that made it possible. A captivating, brilliant work of biography, Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife is a groundbreaking examination of a true literary giant.
"[W]hile Wade's revelations contribute to a nuanced portrait of Stein, Toklas, and their relationship, they fall short of elucidating the hermetic, insular writing that continues to confound Stein's readers. A probing examination of an enigmatic writer." —Kirkus Reviews
"Impressive... As an experiment in biography, [Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife] is strikingly accomplished; as a tale of literary intrigue, it is utterly compelling...For one so invested in her afterlife, [Stein] would have been pleased with such fruits, one imagines, although with none more perhaps than this rich and moving biography of her life and work, placing Toklas at its center. Vindication at last." —The Sunday Times
"Beguiling...Invigorating...The full story of their love affair can only now be told, uncensored, in an afterlife that Wade captures so vividly here." —The Financial Times
"Wade on Stein is a perfect miracle. I feel like I have been waiting for this book my entire life." —Sheila Heti, author of Alphabetical Diaries
"The perfect counterpoint of subtle, elegant biographical writing with a subject who is outrageous, larger-than-life, and anything but subtle. A total joy to read." —Sarah Bakewell, author of At the Existentialist Café
"Francesca Wade's great coup here is to make us understand that there are as many Steins as readers of Stein; that her non-essential essence resides in the relays between her, Toklas, a gaggle of male modernists, a media that wanted a personality but not the challenge of her prose, and a posterity that's only just beginning to find labels for what she was doing. It's a double-coup: to track these shifts and, in their very transpositions, their reflections and diffractions and inversions, to coax an image sharply into view, clear as the lucid if continually morphing picture inside a kaleidoscope." —Tom McCarthy, author of The Making of Incarnation
This information about Gertrude Stein was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Francesca Wade is the author of Square Haunting: Five Writers in London Between the Wars (2020). She has received fellowships from the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center, the Leon Levy Center for Biography and the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, and her writing has appeared in The New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, Paris Review, Granta, and elsewhere.
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