Francesca Wade—Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife

Gertrude Stein’s salon at 27 rue de Fleurus in the 6th arrondissement of Paris is the stuff of literary legend. Many have tried to capture the spirit and glamour of the place that once entertained and fostered the likes of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Pablo Picasso, and Henri Matisse, but perhaps none as determinedly, and self-consciously, as Stein herself. In this new biography of the polarizing, trailblazing author, collector, salonnière, and tastemaker, Francesca Wade rescues Stein from the tangle of contradictions that has characterized her legacy, expertly presenting us with this towering literary figure as we’ve never seen her before.

A genius to her admirers, a charlatan to her detractors, Stein achieved international celebrity in 1933 with her bestselling memoir, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, written in the voice of her devoted partner—a triumph which, ironically, only drew attention away from the avant-garde poetry she called her “real” writing. After Stein’s death in 1946, Alice B. Toklas made it her mission to shepherd all of Stein’s unpublished writing into print, all the while negotiating her own fraught role in the complex mythology they had built together. The biographers who flocked to Stein’s newly opened archive found a surprising trove of secrets which would change Stein’s image forever: a forgotten novel, a cache of love letters, and a series of notebooks which shed entirely new light on her early years in Paris.

Pushing beyond the conventions of literary biography, Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife is a bold, innovative examination of the nature of legacy and memory itself, in which Wade uncovers the origins of Stein’s radical writing and reveals new depths to the storied relationship that made it possible. A captivating, brilliant work of biography, Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife is a groundbreaking examination of a true literary giant.

Francesca Wade is the author of Square Haunting: Five Women, Freedom and London Between the Wars (2020) and Gertrude Stein: an Afterlife (2025). She has held fellowships at the Leon Levy Center for Biography, the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. Her writing has appeared in the New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, Paris Review, Granta and other places.