A Spectacle and Nothing Strange

Jacquelyn Ardam considers Francesca Wade’s “Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife.”

By Jacquelyn ArdamOctober 8, 2025

• Biography & Autobiography

• Literary Criticism

PART ONE OF Francesca Wade’s exciting new biography of Gertrude Stein opens with one of modernism’s primal scenes. In the winter of 1905–06, the 31-year-old unpublished writer sits in a broken armchair in a dilapidated former piano factory in Paris. She is posing for the relatively unknown 24-year-old Spanish painter Pablo Picasso. Stein sits for the portrait for months as Picasso paints and repaints her facial features, eventually giving up in frustration and taking off to Spain. Picasso returns to Paris a few months later with the finished portrait in hand. Stein’s face—previously painted naturalistically—now bears the signature marks of cubism: Stein’s face is a “sculptured mask, its features starkly outlined […] ageless, androgynous, out of time.” Stein says to Picasso that the painting doesn’t look like her. Picasso replies: “It will.”

This story may sound familiar because Stein tells it in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, her best-selling and most widely read book. The Autobiography, published in 1933, made Stein—a middle-aged Jewish lesbian who had lived in Paris for 30 years—into a literary celebrity and a household name in the United States. Written by Stein in the voice of her longtime partner, the eponymous Toklas, the Autobiography tells the story of the pair’s early and middle years in Paris, portrays Stein as a “genius,” and catalogs the writer’s friendships with painters and writers such as Matisse and Picasso, Apollinaire and Eliot. Stein met with the geniuses under her extraordinary collection of modern art, while Toklas sat with the wives.

Up until the Autobiography, much of Stein’s writing was unpublished, and her work that did see print was often released in limited editions or by Stein and Toklas themselves. Stein’s work is known for being repetitive, difficult, obscure, and often more interested in the materiality of language than in narrative or meaning-making. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, by contrast, is an uncharacteristically accessible and funny book. It is a winking feat of self-mythologizing that established Stein’s salon at 27 rue de Fleurus as the epicenter of modernist art and culture, with Stein as its runic grande dame. In the early 1930s, Newsweek wrote that “some people call [Stein] the ‘most intelligent American woman alive today’; others say she is crazy.” Throughout her book, Wade is a sensitive reader of Stein’s more and less experimental work, and she is in on the joke of the Autobiography and aware of how it differs from much of Stein’s oeuvre. She writes that the book is “a triumphant declaration of how [Stein] wanted to be seen” and “a joke, a myth, an audacious act of knowing artifice [that] contravenes every rule of autobiography—and, in doing so, draws attention subtly to its own act of creation.”

Wade’s Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife is an apt heir to Stein’s Autobiography since Wade is as interested in the constructedness of the genre of biography as Stein herself was. Wade’s book—both well researched and breezily readable—cannily reveals how Stein lived, and how we know how she lived. Part one covers territory familiar to any Stein aficionado, telling the story of the author’s life from birth to death and drawing heavily on Stein’s representations of herself across her literary oeuvre and in her letters. Stein was born in 1874 in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, and spent most of her young life in Oakland, California. She moved to Massachusetts to attend Radcliffe College, where she studied with famed psychologist William James. She started—but didn’t finish—medical school at Johns Hopkins, and in 1903 moved with her brother Leo to Paris, where they lived off a monthly allowance from family investments and began collecting art. Wade briskly narrates the writing of Stein’s early texts (including Three Lives [1909], Tender Buttons [1914], and The Making of Americans: Being a History of a Family’s Progress [1925]), her artistic friendships and the salons at 27 rue de Fleurus, her relationship with Toklas, their wartime activities, the fame that came with the publication of the Autobiography, their tour of the United States in the 1930s, and their later years.

The strength of part one lies in Wade’s careful scrutiny of Stein’s letters and her attention to Stein’s investment in her own reputation. Stein always felt that her writing was underappreciated, writing that “it always did bother me that the American public were more interested in me than in my work.” As Wade arrives at the moment of Stein’s death in 1946 on the penultimate page of part one (after her thoughtful analysis of Stein and Toklas’s escape to the French countryside during World War II and some of Stein’s questionable sympathies under the Vichy regime), it feels as though she has written a biography that Gertrude Stein herself would approve of. But when I reached that point in the book, as someone who has studied and written about Stein, I also recognized that so much of the author’s life had been left untold.

Happily, there is a second part to Wade’s tale, and that section complicates all that we’ve read in part one. If the first part reads as a Stein-sanctioned biography, then the second is the more salacious, unauthorized biography that incorporates a broader set of sources to tell Stein’s tale. Part two illuminates Stein’s afterlife by telling the stories of the friends, publishers, editors, curators, and scholars who have created Stein’s posthumous reputation. At the center is Toklas, typing up her partner’s manuscripts during her life and managing her reputation for decades after her death. Gratifyingly, Wade pays particular attention to the ways Stein’s writing and her intimate life with Toklas intertwine, establishing Toklas as an equal creator of the Stein myth that persists today.

To wit: In part one, Wade tells the story of a love triangle in which Stein found herself during her Baltimore years. In her twenties, Stein had an intense relationship with Mary Bookstaver—known as May—who at the time was already in a relationship with Mabel Haynes. Stein fictionalized this love triangle in her book Q.E.D. (1903), which remained unpublished until after her death. Wade does not go into details about this relationship in part one, but in part two, she fleshes out the story, illuminating how the relationship rippled throughout the rest of Stein’s life and writing.

Though Toklas and Stein had vowed, during a quasi-marriage ritual a few years into their relationship, not to keep secrets from each other, Stein never told Toklas about her romantic relationship with Bookstaver, though Bookstaver (later Knoblauch) had played an important role in Stein’s life. When Stein was desperate to publish her writing, Bookstaver facilitated the publication of Stein’s “word portraits” of Matisse and Picasso in Alfred Stieglitz’s influential journal Camera Work in 1912. When Toklas learned, decades later in the 1930s, about Stein and Bookstaver by reading about the lesbian love triangle in the unpublished Q.E.D. (the basis for one of the stories in Three Lives), Toklas took revenge on Stein as only an intimate could. At the time, Stein was working on her book Stanzas in Meditation, and Toklas, who typed her manuscripts, did some unusual editing. Every time Stein had written the word “may” in her notebooks, Toklas crossed it out and replaced it with another word—“can,” “day,” “today”—whether or not the replacement made sense in context. When Stanzas in Meditation was published posthumously in 1956, the text had not a single “may” in it. Toklas had taken her sly revenge. 

Wade has not uncovered new territory here; she draws on and cites the work of scholar Ulla Dydo, who first wrote about Toklas’s “may” edits in a series of articles in the 1980s. And more recent books such as Stanzas in Meditation: The Corrected Edition (2012), edited by Susannah Hollister and Emily Setina, detail and analyze Stein’s composition process and her interplay with Toklas’s edits much more closely than Wade ever does. But in telling the story of Bookstaver, Stein, and Toklas twice, Wade illuminates the constructedness of all biography, asking us to consider how the biographer’s omissions matter as much as their inclusions, and how our understandings of a life and all its complexities might evolve long after that life has been lived.

In this moment when humanistic study is under attack, defunded by the very institutions whose responsibility is to protect it, Wade has written a book that shows the importance of afterlives—the work of editing and publishing, of curation, of scholarly research, of new generations reading afresh—and how tending to them may open texts up in ways their authors might never have imagined.