Sophie Oliver at Literary Review:
It’s not often that a biography really gets going after the author has reached the subject’s death. Gertrude Stein herself predicted that she would only be understood in the future: ‘For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts.’ She wasn’t entirely right, but Francesca Wade’s new ‘afterlife’ of Stein takes the sentiment seriously. The revolutions in language that preoccupied Stein in life were slowly appreciated after her death in 1946. Despite having an unpromising cast of scholars, librarians, publishers and fans, Wade turns the posthumous half of the Stein story into a narrative of suppression, revelation and hopes fulfilled. It helps that there is romance at the heart of it, and a secret notebook.
First, the story of Stein’s life must be told. The myth of Stein, her Parisian salon and her collection of modernist art is immense; Stein scholarship is even bigger. In this inflated scene, Wade’s is a sensitive, compelling study that – like her debut, Square Haunting, a group biography of four women writers living in the same London square – puts writing at the centre of her subject’s world. Her Stein is charming, self-important, eccentric, vulnerable and obsessive, driven to understand her own interests but not always understanding others’. Stein’s preoccupation with knowledge began early.
more here.
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