Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife

Impressive . . . As an experiment in biography, it is strikingly accomplished; as a tale of literary intrigue, it is utterly compelling . . . Wade is skilful at sifting through quantities of material and finding illumination in the ephemeral and the everyday . . . 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 centre. Vindication at last.

[Wade's] scholarly research is terrific, and she is astute in her use of hitherto unseen materials. Resisting hagiography, she has faced up to Stein’s more dubious characteristics, and has shown us vividly what she was like from the point of view of those who knew her. The result is a book that will forever be an essential tool for anyone studying or reading Gertrude Stein.

A masterpiece of biography . . . Wade shows a great sensitivity to the morality of biography writing, and the tendency to sensationalism, historical or contemporary. She’s an exceptional writer, able to draw out the legend, the contradictions and the reality in a fully coherent, dizzyingly comprehensive triptych . . . Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife, exhaustively researched and beautifully written, will become the definitive biography.

Biographical approaches to Stein have often obscured her work with anecdote, but Wade’s attention to the texture of her life with Toklas supports a reading of Stein’s texts that is deft and pleasurable . . . If this book is good news for Stein, it is also good news for biography . . . A risk-taking biography whose scope extends far beyond even its gargantuan subject.

This new portrait of the life and legacy of the great literary modernist – a onetime medical student turned expat novelist, playwright, art collector, saloniste and confidante of Hemingway and Picasso – draws on previously unexamined archival material, emphasizing Stein’s talent for innovation and making the case that her greatest invention may have been herself.

Graceful, exacting . . . Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife does something larger regarding Stein, and biography, as if the question of how useful biography may be for thinking about Stein could become an allegory or test case of biography in general . . . Wade’s book is excitingly different, because it is written not from a position of judgment but from a kind of accurate friendliness.