In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, Francesca Wade chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife.
Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode:
- Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife was sparked by Francesca’s access to previously unpublished Leon Katz interview transcripts with Alice B. Toklas, revealing how Gertrude Stein deliberately constructed her public persona and how Toklas spent 20 years stewarding Stein’s posthumous legacy as instructed by Stein’s will.
- Francesca challenges the conventional biographical form by structuring the narrative in two parts: first telling Stein’s life story as she presented it, then interrogating and deepening that account through posthumous archival discoveries, dramatising how biographical knowledge is constructed rather than simply discovered.
- Francesca deliberately exposes the archival ‘workings’ behind biography, showing how Yale archivist Donald Gallup’s negotiations with Toklas over burning love letters and sealing documents shaped what future generations could know about Stein’s life and her relationships.
- The central enigma Francesca explores is Stein’s binary reputation: celebrated as either a radical modernist writer or merely a personality symbolising 1920s Paris bohemia. This tension frustrated Stein in her lifetime and continues to complicate her literary legacy.
- Francesca concludes that biography is fundamentally an artificial and odd enterprise of converting life’s messiness into linear narrative, with every sentence representing a decision shaped by the biographer’s attitudes and biases. This makes biographical practice itself worthy of interrogation and experimentation
