As part of her account of how amazingly well-known Gertrude Stein had become in America by the mid-1930s, Francesca Wade refers to, but doesn’t quote, this exchange from Top Hat (1935) in which Ginger Rogers’s dressmaker is reading her a telegram:

“Come ahead Stop. Stop being a sap Stop…My husband is stopping at your hotel Stop. When do you start Stop.” I cannot understand who wrote this.

Rogers: Sounds like Gertrude Stein.

I suspect Wade doesn’t quote this because it is too silly for her purposes. She has written an admirably thoughtful and responsible account of Stein—her life, her work, her relationships, and her shifting reputation. She guides us attentively through all Stein’s writings, though close literary analysis is not her main focus. Her scholarly research is terrific, and she is astute in her use of hitherto unseen materials. Resisting hagiography, she has faced up to Stein’s more dubious characteristics, and has shown us vividly what she was like from the point of view of those who knew her. The result is a book that will forever be an essential tool for anyone studying or reading Gertrude Stein.

Though Wade likes to refer to Stein’s humor (she is often seen twinkling, chuckling, or giggling), especially in the teasing performance that is The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), she takes her subject very seriously. Stein’s claim to be the genius of her times, modernism’s “preeminent” and transformative figure, is treated with respectful conviction. Wade encourages us to think of Stein as “less a writer in the conventional sense than a philosopher of language.” The way to read Stein, she tells us, is to “trust her,” not to try and explain her. She repudiates the disbelieving mockery and satire that greeted every stage of Stein’s working life, attributing them always—and often justly—to misogyny, homophobia, conservatism, jealousy, antisemitism, or closed-mindedness. It would undermine Wade’s whole project to see her subject as in any way a figure of fun. For the reader with mixed feelings about Stein, this book makes it no easier to decide whether she was the most remarkable creative experimentalist of her century or a ludicrously self-inflated, intolerably repetitive, and dead-end mannerist—or perhaps a bit of both. For Wade, who is entranced by her, she is an “enduring enigma.”

Unusually, this is a biography in two equal halves: the life and the afterlife. The subtitle suggests that Wade wanted to concentrate on the latter, but felt the need to precede it with the life story. Because that story has been often told, more of the excitement of the book gathers in the second half, with its archival quests and its fascinating plots of reception and reputation. That suits Stein, who was hungry for immortality and whose gargantuan appetite for world fame began early: “I always wanted to be historical, from almost a baby on.”

In recounting the formative years of that ambitious baby (who as an adult loved to be babied, and whose pet name was Baby), Wade manages the difficult feat of not being swamped by Stein’s own self-mythologizing in The Making of Americans, Everybody’s Autobiography,and elsewhere. We get a clear view of the German Jewish immigrant family settling in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, then Baltimore, and then Oakland, California; of the five siblings bereaved by the death of the meek, sickly mother (when Gertrude, the youngest child, was fourteen); and then, for three years until he too died, of the domineering father’s bullying regime. Stein later turned that father figure (as Woolf and Plath would turn their domineering fathers) into a prototype for fascist regime leaders. “Fathers are depressing,” she writes in Everybody’s Autobiography in 1937. “There is too much fathering going on just now…. There is father Mussolini and father Hitler…and father Stalin…. Fathers are depressing.”

Stein and her clever brother Leo escaped together to Harvard and Radcliffe, where Stein started to think clinically about human behavior, in her psychology studies under William James (a more liberating kind of father figure, who could see she was exceptional) and in her few years at Johns Hopkins Medical School in Baltimore (which she gave up because she felt bored and patronized). Wade shows us how Stein’s lifelong thinking about character types and her attempts at systems of “classification” came out of this student training. She wanted to get at people’s “inner lives,” what she called their “bottom nature.” By attending to and describing the way people talk—insisting and emphasizing and endlessly repeating themselves—she aimed, says Wade, at charting “a cosmic map of humanity.” Drawing on people she knew, she sought to “build a comprehensive stratification of every possible ‘type’ of human character.” In early compositions, she tried to embody the essence of individuals to show, as she put it, how “any one being one is that one.” From the first, her ambitions were epic: one of her early enthusiasms as a student was for Wagner.

Her own nature, in youth, is forcefully conveyed: stocky, dark-haired, “voluptuous,” confident, talkative, imperious: one of her teachers called her “the Battle-Axe.” A fellow woman student at Hopkins remembered that Stein’s “idea of argument” was (figuratively) “to throw her shoes at you, pitch you down a flight of stairs, trample on you, and leave you wordless and for dead.” We hear about an early love triangle, in Baltimore, with two posh young women, May Bookstaver and Mabel Haynes, the subject of Stein’s first unpublished novel, which would cause trouble later. We hear about her self-taught immersion in the whole of English literature, and about her and Leo’s move to Paris in 1903, when she was twenty-nine. From their Left Bank ateliershe would write—like many of her fellow self-exiled compatriots—about America and Americanness.

Here are the familiar colorful stories of artists and writers in pre-war Paris, and of the Steins’ bold venture into the world of painters and art dealers as, living off a family allowance, they began to create their astonishing collection of modern French art (including Cézanne’s 1878 Madame Cézanne with a Fan and Matisse’s 1905 Woman with a Hat,which greatly influenced Gertrude’s thoughts about portraiture). Here is the dramatic arrival of Alice Toklas (intense, small, dark, musical, worldly, stylish, Californian, Jewish, determined), her rapid takeover of Stein’s domestic, sexual, social, and working life, and the bitter rift with Leo, who never afterward had a good word to say about his sister or she about him. After he left, the door to his room was plastered up.

Wade’s recounting of the legendary story of Stein and Toklas—or “Gertice” and “Altrude,” as Stein once doodled their names in a notebook—at 27 rue de Fleurus in the 1910s and 1920s, where Stein talked to the painters and the writers and Toklas to the wives and mistresses, inevitably draws on The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas,though Wade’s version sometimes smooths over the laconic, faux-naïf, quirky tone of her source. Here, for instance, is Wade’s account of Stein and Picasso’s first meeting:

By the end of their first dinner together, Picasso and Gertrude were play-fighting over the last slice of bread, Gertrude concealing her giggles as Picasso, under his breath, poked fun at curmudgeonly Leo’s clichéd enthusiasm for fashionable Japanese prints.

And this is the original version, in the Autobiography:

He was sitting next to Gertrude Stein at dinner and she took up a piece of bread. This, said Picasso, snatching it back with violence, this piece of bread is mine. She laughed and he looked sheepish. That was the beginning of their intimacy.

That evening Gertrude Stein’s brother took out portfolio after portfolio of japanese prints to show Picasso…. He said under his breath to Gertrude Stein, he is very nice, your brother, but like all americans…he shows you japanese prints. Moi j’aime pas ca, no I don’t care for it.

Picasso, whose mighty portrait of Stein did much to immortalize her (as he knew it would), is a major and magnetic figure here. He once addressed an envelope to her as “Gertrude Stein, Man of Letters.” Wade takes this not as a mischievous, affectionate joke but as his acknowledgment of Stein as his equal. And Wade does believe, as do many Stein fans, that her move away from the “falsity” of representational narrative by using Picasso’s Cubist methods achieved in prose what he created in painting:

Just as Picasso sought to convey the essence of a person or object without simply creating a replica, Stein wanted her writing to feel not like a description of sounds, colors, or emotions, but an “intellectual recreation” of the “thing in itself.”

Wade admires the sensual, domestic vignettes that make up Tender Buttons (1914), calling the book “a celebration of mutability…where words are set free from the shackles of memory…and charged with the power to make the world afresh.” No quarter is given to those who doubt whether linear sentence experiments like “A seal and matches and a swan and ivy and a suit” or “Chain-boats are merry, are merry blew, blew west, carpet” can have the same effect as, say, Picasso’s 1913 Bottle of Vieux Marc, Glass, Guitar and Newspaper.

Big claims for Stein’s supreme originality and “force” are made throughout. These are applied to the “stylistic breakthrough” of Three Lives (1909), those intense representations of the experiences of working-class and mixed-race Baltimore women through “cascades” of fluid, accumulative paragraph-streams, and to the gargantuan thousand-page rendition of identities through repetition, The Making of Americans (written 1906–1908, published 1925), described here as “a radical redefinition of the novel,” a “constellation of the human mind,” and a “map of reality.” As in:

Every one is one inside them, every one reminds some one of some other one who is or was or will be living. Every one has it to say of each one he is like such a one I see it in him, every one has it to say of each one she is like some one else I can tell by remembering. So it goes on always in living.

And so it goes on. Sometimes the praise feels excessively solemn, as when Wade comments on Stein’s late-1920s essays on grammar: “She moved increasingly away from nouns, whose meanings were disappointingly preordained, and from punctuation, which she found didactic.”

For all her devotion to the work, though, Wade is unflinching about the unappealing aspects of Stein’s behavior, like her jealous claims for literary preeminence and her dismissal of inadequate friends, whom she would “remove from her sight lines and pretend…had never existed.” The long list of casualties includes Mabel Dodge, enthusiastic patron of the arts, who felt that Toklas had malevolently turned Stein against her, and the young American composer who, during his collaboration with Stein on their opera Four Saints in Three Acts (which, when performed by black singers in 1934, was an astounding success in New York), received a calling card stating that she “declines further acquaintance with Virgil Thomson.”

Anyone who worked with or for her ran that risk. Robert McAlmon, the publisher of The Making of Americans, a hard book to sell, was blamed for its lack of financial success. Her agent William Bradley was sacked with “a series of vehement letters” while he was trying to do his best for her. Maria and Eugene Jolas, who published many of her pieces in their magazine, transition, made the mistake of “favoring Joyce’s work over her own.” Stein could not tolerate competition: “I know I am doing more important things than any of my contemporaries.” She had no time for rival male modernists—Pound, Wyndham Lewis, Eliot, and especially Joyce: “The success of Ulysses was particularly hard to bear.” (They were all pretty unpleasant about her, too.) The most notorious of these feuds was with Hemingway, condescendingly portrayed in the Autobiography: “It is so flattering to have a pupil who does it without understanding it.” Hemingway famously took his revenge in A Moveable Feast (posthumously published in 1964), caricaturing a sadomasochistic relationship between Stein and Toklas and summing Stein up, as Wade puts it, as “a haughty, power-crazed Roman emperor, quarrelling with everyone and diluting her great art collection with worthless paintings.” Nobody comes well out of this.

One of Wade’s interesting archival discoveries is that the Autobiography was written to appease Toklas’s “seething” rage and jealousy after she had been shown the unpublished early novel called Q.E.D., which Stein had written in 1903—and then put in a drawer and forgotten for many years—about the painful love triangle of her youth. (It was eventually published posthumously, in 1950, as Things As They Are.) The Autobiography, Wade argues, was “a form of reparation,” which “would affirm her commitment to Toklas once and for all” and which “witheringly dismissed” everyone who had ever “caused strife between them.”

But it was also a bid for success in the marketplace. Stein had been a literary notoriety ever since Three Lives, but a bemusing one. Now, with this light, entertaining narrative, her readers gave a sigh of relief: “She had, at last, begun to make sense.” Along with the success of the Thomson opera, the Autobiography brought her huge celebrity, just as she had always wanted—“I am adoring being successful.” Her return with Toklas to America in 1934 after thirty years away, for a long nationwide lecture tour, was a wild triumph. Wade describes crowds gathering at the dock, strangers greeting her in the street, newspapers reporting her every saying. In Washington they had tea with Eleanor Roosevelt, in California they met Charlie Chaplin and Dashiell Hammett, in Chicago they took a ride in a squad car, and in New York the Times headline was: “Gertrude Stein Arrives and Baffles Reporters by Making Herself Clear.”

The acclaim also created a problem. The success of the Autobiography meant that no one wanted the “difficult” work anymore, and journalists’ concentration on her personality, her lifestyle, and her performance, rather than on the importance of her work, frustrated her:

She had finally achieved the fame she had long desired, but for the wrong reasons: she was being appreciated not as a serious writer, but as the comic heroine of Alice B. Toklas’s fictional autobiography.

She went on writing through the late 1930s and early 1940s, though not in the reader-friendly style of the Autobiography, much of the time in their country home in Bilignin in southeastern France, near the Swiss border. She had another big success with Wars I Have Seen, in 1945, the year before she died. But she always nurtured a lingering feeling that she had not been properly or adequately recognized. Posterity would make up for it, she was sure.

Like all biographers of legendary, controversial subjects, Wade is to an extent writing “against” previous versions of the life story, especially in the many troublesome areas of this one. Among these is the issue of race. Wade accepts the accusations of “crass” racial stereotyping that have been leveled at “Melanctha,” in Three Lives, though she notes that Richard Wright praised it in 1945 as the first attempt by a white American writer to “treat Negro lives seriously.” But there is a complication. When the early love novel, Q.E.D., emerged posthumously, it was noted that it bore a strong resemblance to “Melanctha,” which was written a few years later. Janet Malcolm, in her savage evisceration of Stein’s reputation in Two Lives (2007),^* argued that the story’s “patronizing and uncomprehending” account of black lives was not really based on “Stein’s experience of black life in America” but on her early heartbreak over May Bookstaver, faked as a black story. Wade gives a more benign reading of the subterfuge:

It’s plausible that she saw a certain affinity between her own outsider status and that of the mixed-race Melanctha—that in changing the characters’ races, she had wanted to think through the experience of otherness without being immediately identifiable as the protagonist.

The disguising of a white American lesbian love story as a black heterosexual narrative raises another issue. Stein and Toklas kept quiet about their lesbianism (understandably, given the homophobia of the times). They presented themselves “as a couple as if it were entirely unremarkable,” though there are many “scattered” clues in Stein’s work about same-sex desire and love. Their public discretion about their sexuality (perhaps, Wade thinks, insisted on by Toklas rather than Stein) was noted by Edmund Wilson in his 1951 review of Things as They Are—in which he also wonders, with some sympathy, whether Stein’s “great iceberg of megalomania” came out of “emotional solitude.” Only after his review did the floodgates open to Stein’s posthumous acclaim as a lesbian icon—which was not how she presented herself in her lifetime. Nor was she at all interested in feminism or solidarity with other women. Wade puts this dryly: “Stein was not usually concerned with empowering displays of sisterhood.”

An even more troubling question, for all Stein’s biographers, is how—as Malcolm puts it—this “pair of elderly Jewish lesbians” survived the Second World War and the occupation. Having decided not to flee to America or Switzerland, they hid out for the duration in their country home, with Basket the white poodle and Pépé the chihuahua, apparently being protected by the locals, until they went back to Paris in 1945. Stein took a heroic line: “They are always trying to get us to leave France, but here we are and here we stay.” They sold Madame Cézanne in order to survive, but the priceless collection of paintings left behind in Paris was kept safe, partly with Picasso’s help, partly by the good offices of their friend Bernard Faÿ, administrator of the Bibliothèque Nationale, who may have been protecting them as well as the pictures. Faÿ was arrested in 1944 as a Nazi collaborator, who had also sent Jews and Freemasons to the concentration camps. Stein did not believe the charges. She wrote in his defense for his trial, and told a friend that she did not believe he had ever denounced anyone. “She was wrong,” says Wade.

Stein also maintained an admiration for Marshal Pétain, the head of the Vichy regime, and in 1941 proposed to an American publisher a translation of his speeches. Was this “intended as a bargaining chip for her protection?” Even if not, it “remains astonishing” that she would think of engaging in “active propaganda” for the regime by that time and shows a “willful blindness” to the facts. There’s also an ugly story of a 1934 interview with The New York Times, where she was quoted recommending Hitler for the Nobel Peace Prize because of his success in driving Jews and leftists out of Germany. Wade regards this as a “slander”: it’s clear that Stein was speaking with bitter irony and that it was entirely at odds with her hatred of all fascist “fathers,” her support of the Resistance, and her acute, imperiled sense of herself and Toklas as potential victims of the Nazis. Wade acknowledges Stein’s mistakes, her naiveté, and inconsistency, but mounts a careful defense of her against accusations brought by Malcolm and others that turn her into a fascist sympathizer and “outright monster.”

After Stein died in 1946 (at seventy-two, of uterine cancer), one of Toklas’s many startling subsequent actions was to help Faÿ escape from prison. (He was later pardoned.) Presumably Toklas felt that in this, as in everything she did until her own death twenty years later, she was carrying out Stein’s wishes. Their relationship—a complex mix of tender intimacy, possessiveness, jealous conflict, and shared eccentricities—is a hard nut for a biographer to crack, though Wade does her best. Touchingly, she concentrates on Toklas as Stein’s reader and muse, the person who gave her confidence in her writing. “You write a book,” said Stein in The Making of Americans,

and while you write it…you know you will be laughed at or pitied by every one…and you are not very certain and you go on writing. Then some one says yes to it…and then never again can you have completely such a feeling of being afraid and ashamed.

Wade comments: “‘Some one says yes to it’: the most romantic words Stein ever wrote.”

But once Toklas became the keeper of the flame, controlling the afterlife with an exasperating mixture of stubbornness and inconsistency, her role as Stein’s alter ego was ever more problematic, dominated by the insoluble contradiction that “Stein’s desire for publicity would be set directly at odds with Toklas’s deep-seated instinct for privacy.”

Throughout, Wade is excellent on the true believers: the devotees, collectors, scholars, publishers, archivists, and librarians (the real heroes of the story) who pour their energies, their reputations, and sometimes their money into sustaining and immortalizing Stein’s work, during and after her lifetime. There are lively portraits of Carl Van Vechten, the flamboyant, wealthy dance and theater critic with strong links to Harlem, and the young, serious curator Donald Gallup, who form an unlikely partnership in their efforts to place Stein’s gigantic hoard of manuscripts in the Yale University library (that are now in the Beinecke). The project was abetted by the novelist Thornton Wilder and spearheaded by Norman Holmes Pearson, who established in the 1930s Yale’s great archive of American literature (and who was also a CIA agent).

Stein loved the idea of an archive that would ensure her immortality. She thought of it, Wade says, as “a kind of time capsule where facts and secrets could be buried in order to be excavated.” But when control passed to Toklas, things got tricky. She sent off boxes and boxes of materials, including hundreds of manuscript notebooks, turning the Yale library, in Gallup’s words, into a “wastepaper collection center.” Then, panicking about the intimacy of some of the materials, which included years’ worth of love letters between them, she asked for them all to be burned, “before the biography writers get their talons in.” Gallup and Van Vechten persuaded her, instead, to have them sealed up during her lifetime. Now everyone can read the exchanges between “Mr and Mrs Cuddle-Wuddle,” “precious baby,” “sweet pinky,” “darling wifey,” and “little hubby.” Wade treats these love notes kindly: in her view they show “their mutual delight…in the shared home and life they maintained.”

Toklas’s old age of poverty (Stein left a messy will), rows with the Stein family over the possession of the pictures, and late conversion to Catholicism—in the hopes of being reunited with Stein after death—make largely sad reading. Her defensive dealings with “biography writers,” critics, archivists, and publishers are gripping to hear about but must have been excruciating to experience. One would-be memoirist, Max White, retreating from the fray, called her “the slave to a legend”; another, Elizabeth Sprigge, brushed off by Toklas as a vulgar anecdotalist, was left bemused by her encounters; another, John Malcolm Brinnin, was met with a “stony refusal” to help. Books on Stein were annotated by Toklas with derisive no’s: “The only story she would now accept was her own.” The most tragic biographical case is that of Leon Katz, a young devotee of Stein who discovered a tranche of revealing notebooks in the Yale archive, set out to use them as the basis of a thesis, embarked on a long series of revelatory conversations with Toklas, spent the rest of his life writing up his findings, but, much to the frustration of other Stein scholars, died at ninety-seven, in 2017, without ever publishing them. Wade has been the first person to read Katz’s papers at Yale, and many of the discoveries in this book draw on them.

The book’s “afterlife” structure can be awkward, as it involves going back over events on which new light has been cast by those discoveries. Though these repetitions could be seen as fittingly Steinian, they make for some cumbersome moments. But the advantage of the structure is that it can emphasize Stein’s posthumous influence on figures such as John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, John Cage, Andy Warhol, and the team at the Living Theatre. Wade enjoys tracking the continuing reinterpretations of Stein in the eighty years since her death as she settled, surviving ridicule and incomprehension, into the modernist, feminist, and lesbian canon.

A high point of that afterlife for Wade is a “marathon reading” in 1973 of The Making of Americans at a gallery in New York City by a large, floating group of readers, beginning on December 30, lasting over fifty hours, and ending on the evening of New Year’s Day, a ritual that became an often-repeated event. The less convinced among us might well cry out “TAXI!!!” at the very thought. But there is something moving, all the same, about Wade’s generous delight at the prospect:

As the novel is read aloud, the beguiling flow of its rhythms is revealed, the repetitions first maddening, then profound. The humor of Stein’s writing shines through, and—above all—the beautiful moments of clarity, the emphasis on life, on living. As the hours pass…readers bear witness to the narrator’s growing excitement in her work…and her questing insight into human nature, charting the inevitable passage from birth toward death.