When The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas was published in 1933, it made 60-year-old Gertrude Stein famous after decades of obscurity. The book painted a thrilling picture of life among the Parisian haute bohème in the early years of the 20th century. Picasso, Matisse, Scott Fitzgerald and Ezra Pound all made repeat appearances at the apartment in Rue de Fleurus which Stein shared with her partner Toklas. After decades of pushing language to its limits, Stein had written The Autobiography in a comparatively accessible style with jokes and anecdotes and full sentences. Or, as one relieved critic noted at the time, Gertrude Stein had finally started making sense.
In this thoughtful and deeply researched book, Francesca Wade explains that the success of The Autobiography had the unintended effect of moving the focus from Stein as a writer to Stein as a celebrity. While she loved the fame and money, what Stein really wanted was to be acknowledged for her earlier, more radical work in which words were set free from the shackles of meaning and grammar. The fact that her epic The Making of Americans, composed between 1902 and 1911, failed to find a publisher until 1925 had meant that James Joyce and TS Eliot, whose respective breakthroughs came in 1922 with the publication of Ulysses and The Wasteland, were regularly hailed as the founders of literary modernism. This left Stein looking like a latecomer or, worse still, a copycat.
