Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife
Wade’s superb new book...is the biography of both a woman and a reputation. The biography of the woman has been written several times already, though perhaps never so stylishly. The biography of the reputation is in large part fresh. Both are a pleasure to read ... Wade has a sense for character and an eye for detail, and in the first part of Gertrude Stein, she paints a vivid portrait of her striving, grasping subject ... The revelations in Gertrude Stein are exciting, but perhaps even more gripping are the characters the book brings so vividly to life.
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Buoyant if somewhat boosterish ... Wade translates even Stein’s seeming shortcomings into strengths ... Wade draws on extensive interviews.
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The structure...allows its readers to understand something that usually goes unmentioned in literary biographies. A writer is not merely the sum total of known events that occurred to her between birth and death, she is also the network of readers created by her work during that period and afterward ... When Wade is confronted by writing she doesn’t understand, curiosity rather than resentment wins the day ... The superiority of Wade’s approach can be measured by the insights into Stein’s work that she gleans from it ... Thoughtful and thorough, with insightful interpretations of her work embedded in a compelling narrative of her and Toklas’s life, Wade’s biography makes a convincing case that, while her status as a cultural figure is secure, her writing remains, if anything, underrated.
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