Brenda Maddox
On the Stein Trail
Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice
By Janet Malcolm
Yale University Press 229pp £16.99 order from our bookshop
Good question: how did two Jewish lesbians survive in Nazi-occupied France? Janet Malcolm addresses the mystery. Gertrude Stein and her lover, Alice B Toklas, both from Jewish-American business families, refused all suggestions that they return to the United States or steal quietly into neutral Switzerland. Instead they stayed put, mainly at Bilignin, their village in eastern France, and watched others being rounded up and sent to German camps.
Who would believe that a large part of the answer was lying in the bowels of the Beinecke, Yale University's splendid research library? Janet Malcolm of the New Yorker, prodigiously aided by Stein scholars who have searched manuscripts, unpublished dissertations and unsuspected correspondence, has found that the Stein–Toklas protector was
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'McCarthy’s portrayal of a cosmos fashioned by God for killing and exploitation, in which angels, perhaps, are predators and paedophiles, is one that continues to haunt me.'
@holland_tom on reading Blood Meridian in the American west (£).
https://literaryreview.co.uk/devils-own-country
'Perhaps, rather than having diagnosed a real societal malaise, she has merely projected onto an entire generation a neurosis that actually affects only a small number of people.'
@HoumanBarekat on Patricia Lockwood's 'No One is Talking About This'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/culturecrisis
*Offer ends in TWO days*
Take advantage of our February offer: a six-month subscription for only £19.99.
https://www.mymagazinesub.co.uk/literary-review/promo/literaryfebruary/