'A total joy to read.' SARAH BAKEWELL
'Thrillingly intelligent and original . . . A breakthrough in biographical form.' EDMUND GORDON
'A discerning literary biography and a page-turning whodunit.' LISA APPIGNANESI
'I feel like I've been waiting for this book my whole life.' SHEILA HETI
From the celebrated author of Square Haunting comes a biography as unconventional and surprising as the life it tells.
'Think of the Bible and Homer, think of Shakespeare and think of me,' wrote Gertrude Stein in 1936. Admirers called her a genius, sceptics a charlatan: she remains one of the most confounding - and contested - writers of the twentieth century.
In this literary detective story, Francesca Wade delves into the creation of the Stein myth. We see her posing for Picasso's portrait; at the centre of Bohemian Parisian life hosting the likes of Matisse and Hemingway; racing through the French countryside with her enigmatic companion Alice B. Toklas; dazzling American crowds on her sell-out tour for her sensational Autobiography - a veritable celebrity.
Yet Stein hoped to be remembered not for her personality but for her work. From her deathbed, she charged her partner with securing her place in literary history. How would her legend shift once it was Toklas's turn to tell the stories - especially when uncomfortable aspects of their past emerged from the archive? Using astonishing never-before-seen material, Wade uncovers the origins of Stein's radical writing, and reveals new depths to the storied relationship which made it possible.
This is Gertrude Stein as she was when nobody was watching: captivating, complex and human.

Portrait

Francesca Wade is the author of Square Haunting: Five Women, Freedom and London Between the Wars (2020), which was longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize and shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize. She has received fellowships from the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center at the New York Public Library, the Leon Levy Center for Biography and the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, and her work has appeared in The New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, Granta and other places. She lives in London.