• 29 Dec, 2025 *

Like most people I’ve got complicated, conflicted feelings about Gertrude Stein. I don’t think I’d like to know her, I think she was probably quite hard work as a friend for most people. But I am fascinated.

This latest bout of thinking-about-Gertrude-Stein is courtesy of Francesca Wade’s Gertrude Stein An Afterlife, a stonking huge biography. It’s a biography in two parts, the life and the afterlife. As with so many people and certainly Stein, the legacy is half the story. Which deserves its own biography.

The book is great. I read it too fast because I was just devouring it and will need to read it again, slower, properly, taking more notes.

A few fun quotes:

words are set free from the shackles of meaning and grammatical function, made unfamiliar, and charged with the power to make the world afresh.

Now, I’m no linguist. But isn’t this sort of the point of words?

‘Forget grammar’, she wrote one day (perhaps around dinner time), ‘and think about potatoes.’

I can get behind this though.

Like a DJ, Stein blurs and distorts language, sampling, looping, the pulse of her insistent beat building up through emphasis, varying through subtle shifts.

And also this. Approaching texts as songs, which are texts, but with verse and chorus and rhyme and rhythm, has really helped me not just with the oral epics like Gilgamesh and The Iliad but things like Joyce and Stein. (Amused by the ire this pairing would have provoked.)

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is a joke, a myth, an audacious act of knowing artifice. It contravenes every rule of autobiography - and, in doing so, draws attention subtly to its own act of creation.

On the shadowy subject of Toklas. Must we imagine her with agency? I think perhaps we must. Because it’s easy not to, and also terrifying not to. So I choose to.

I’d been aware of Stein obviously but it wasn’t until April 2020 that I read something in the Guardian recommending starting with The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. And I’d always been into that Parisian milieu. So I did.

And, as is so often the case, lost my damn mind. My dumb ass thought it would be a fun AU for a fic. And we were off to the races.

I’ve written about biographies before and my interest in them just grows and grows. I’ve also just read The Unfinished Harauld Hughes by Richard Ayoade. In fact, listened to, which was a whole fun experience. On the Stein/Toklas front I’ve got Janet Malcolm’s Two Lives, also Diana Souhami’s Gertrude and Alice still to come.

[#reading lists](https://francescrossley.com/blog/?q=reading lists)