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. Studying psychology with William James, she discovered an interest in the mind and perception. On a trip to London in 1902 – her freedom to travel and write was supported by an allowance from a wealthy brother – she spent five months in the British Museum, reading her way through centuries of English literature. 

Stein thought literature should study people’s essential character, what she called their ‘bottom nature’. Her first and most monumental innovation, The Making of Americans, begun in 1903 in Paris, is a ‘complete history of everyone’ – purposely repetitive, without a plot but pulsing with the lives of its characters. It is, Wade says, ‘less a novel than a constellation of the human mind, a map of reality that yields its most pressing insights into the mind of its anxiously questing narrator’. Like the author, this narrator is ‘in the process of learning what it means to make reality out of words’.

The book is full of similarly sharp articulations of Stein’s experiment. Wade identifies Stein’s achievement in Tender Buttons (1914) as the recognition of ‘words as living entities with physical properties of their own’. She gives herself over, with Stein, to the ludic pleasures of language: ‘Stein delights in defining things, and posing questions that cannot be answered because their component words bear little obvious relation to each other – “Why is a feel oyster an egg stir”.’ Stein’s own reflections illuminate her method (‘Forget grammar and think about potatoes’) and ego (‘I have been the creative literary mind of the century’). 

Wade approaches the quirks of Stein’s life with openness too. Allegations that Stein and her partner, Alice B Toklas, managed to see out the war in France (along with their famous art collection) because they collaborated with the Vichy government are carefully sifted but ultimately rejected. Stein could be perplexing when it came to politics, but Wade shows there is always an explanation other than that Stein was a fascist sympathiser. In 1946, a letter from Stein proposing a translation of Pétain’s speeches reached Bennett Cerf, her editor at Random House. When Cerf expressed shock at the idea, Stein cabled back: ‘KEEP YOUR SHIRT ON BENNETT DEAR LETTER RE PETAIN WAS WRITTEN IN 1941.’ 

It is tempting to create monsters out of mythological figures. Here, Stein is merely human, and nowhere more so than in her relationship with Toklas. Devoted to Stein, Toklas has herself suffered stereotyping, being presented at best as ‘a silent, picturesque object in the background’ and at worst as ‘Stein’s little acolyte’. But Wade sees that Stein’s writing could not have happened without the stability and love Toklas provided, and that the rhythms of their domestic life – in Paris and at their country house in the south of France – inflect her work. For all the encounters with Picasso and Hemingway, their private world was far more significant to Stein’s modernism. 

The tension between public myth and private complexities is a motif here. Stein herself desperately wanted to be famous. ‘Neither you nor I have ever had any passion to be rare,’ she wrote to the composer Virgil Thomson. ‘We want to be as popular as Gilbert and Sullivan.’ It was in this spirit that she took up what she called her ‘audience writing’, most successfully in her ventriloquised The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas, and embarked on a lecture tour of the United States. Already by the 1930s she had begun donating her papers to the Beinecke Library at Yale, hoping to ensure her legacy. But her growing celebrity also caused her anxiety. She once imagined writing a novel where ‘a person is so publicised that there isn’t any personality left’. She felt bitter that authors like Joyce and Eliot achieved aesthetic respect, while she was known mostly as a curiosity. 

If much of Stein and Toklas’s relationship was spent preparing for Stein’s afterlife, Toklas’s own second act involved putting the plans into action. After Stein’s death, she took up a position as chief curator of her memory. Along with the Yale archivist Donald Gallup and the writer and man about town Carl Van Vechten, she made sure that Stein’s unpublished work, including her first novella, QED, about lesbian relationships, appeared in print. The second part of Wade’s book traces the gradual making of Stein’s reputation as an important innovator, thanks to the efforts of studious readers, ardent supporters and queer publishers. It is a moving story. Stein had long hoped for gloire (her expression); it was finally achieved thanks to the work of friends and the love of her life.

There is a twist in that love story. As she emerged from her grief, Toklas began to talk. She was particularly open with a determined scholar who was keen to hear Toklas’s recollections of Stein’s process. It was this man, Leon Katz, who produced the secret notebook. He jotted down everything Toklas told him, including confessions of her jealousy and details of Stein’s self-doubts. Katz’s research is already legendary: his PhD thesis revealed Toklas’s fury at her discovery (after reading the manuscript of QED) that Stein had once been in love with a woman called May Bookstaver. Janet Malcolm, writing about Stein for the New Yorker, tried and failed to see Katz’s famous leather notebook. When he died in 2017 and his papers were sold to Yale, Wade was the first person to read it.

What she found gives a subtle new shape to Stein’s life with Toklas, and to Stein’s work. The implications of Toklas’s wrath about Bookstaver become clearer: ‘For a year and a half, Toklas confessed to Katz, she … told any of Stein’s old friends who called that Stein was sleeping and could not be disturbed.’ Katz realised that Stein had written The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas in this atmosphere, and that her most renowned book – a display of mutual devotion – may have been an attempt to publicly extinguish private fires. Toklas came into Stein’s life just as Gertrude was growing apart from her younger brother, Leo, whose cruel response to The Making of Americans was the first of many painful rejections. That book could only be finished, and further experiments undertaken, because Toklas arrived – and understood.

Wade shows that even the most abstract art is bound up with life. This doesn’t mean that the biographer can shed light on everything. There are things the notebook can’t explain, secrets that Stein and Toklas took to the grave. But this unconventional biography – which, like its subject, explores how knowledge is gained – does reveal something unlikely and essential about Stein: she wrote to connect with others. When understanding was in short supply, there was always Toklas.