13-05-2025
Gertrude Stein — self-declared literary genius and ‘Mrs Cuddle-Wuddle'
For the literary biographer, an archive can be as unreliable and secretive as her subject. The American writer Gertrude Stein began submitting boxes of her papers to Yale University ten years before her death, intoxicated by the idea of an afterlife. Stein had always sought fame — or gloire, as she called it; upon her death, she wanted nothing short of immortality. But while she was happy for boxes of her papers to be sent indiscriminately to Yale, and stipulated in her will that any unpublished manuscripts be printed, her life partner and creative collaborator, Alice Toklas, was determined for some secrets to be kept.
In her impressive biography of Stein, Francesca Wade is part researcher, part sleuth. Her book is a story of
