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Today, modernist literary icon Gertrude Stein is famous for many reasons. The “autobiography” she wrote of her partner Alice B. Toklas: a gossipy, ironic tour of bohemian Paris, featuring memorable cameos by artist Henri Matisse, poet T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway and others. Surviving Nazi-occupied France as a Jewish lesbian, somehow. And of course, her dazzling, disorienting and difficult body of work. Often in that order.

Francesca Wade’s ambitious new biography Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife charts how her subject sought and achieved lasting fame – but not exactly on her own terms.

“Work your ass off to change the language and don’t ever get famous,” experimental American poet Bernadette Mayer – who was influenced by Stein – told her students. Stein did, undeniably, challenge the way we think about language – as well as about meaning and literary form.

Wade’s nuanced biography is divided into two distinct parts. The first is a rich, detailed account of Stein’s life and career. The second picks up in the immediate aftermath of Stein’s death in 1946. Shifting registers, it charts the complicated and contested legacy she left behind.

Wade traces Stein’s posthumous reputation through currents in criticism, showing how her work has been variously celebrated or sidelined, depending on prevailing ideological and educational trends.

The result is a book as much about Stein’s lasting presence in our culture as it is about the life she lived.

From Pennsylvania to Paris

Born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, in 1874, Stein studied psychology at Radcliffe College under the tutelage of William James, conducting research into processes of attention and the workings of the human mind. Her true intellectual and artistic journey, however, began when she moved to Paris in 1903.

Stein immersed herself in the city’s bustling modern art scene and hosted salons in her apartment at 27 rue de Fleurus on the Left Bank. From there, she honed a pioneering approach to writing that came to define her creative practice.

The move marked a decisive break with the conventions of 19th-century realism and the emergence of a singular literary voice – rhythmic, irreverent, recursive and pretty much unlike anything else out there. Inspired by the formal innovations of Cubism and particularly by her close friendship with Pablo Picasso, who painted a famous portrait of her, Stein strove to translate visual abstraction into words.

Her most famous works included Tender Buttons (1914) and The Making of Americans (1925). Playful and provocative in equal doses, her prose takes no prisoners.

Just as Cubist painters distorted perspective to reveal multiple viewpoints at once, Stein dismantled conventional syntax and structure, aiming not to describe experience, but to enact it on the printed page.

Here, for example, is Stein’s description of what she assures us is meant to be a piano, taken from Tender Buttons:

If the speed is open, if the color is careless, if the selection of a strong scent is not awkward, if the button holder is held by all the waving color and there is no color, not any color. If there is no dirt in a pin and there can be none scarcely, if there is not then the place is the same as up standing.

As Wade notes, Stein’s uncompromising writing, replete as it is with “wordplay, non-sequitur and extended passages of repetition, confounded publishers, critics and readers”. Bafflement soon became suspicion.

Was Stein a genius, revolutionising a sterile literary tradition, or a self-important charlatan? A true experimenter who freed language from its formal constraints, or a pretender who knew nothing about the modern art she supposedly championed?

A gossipy tour of bohemian Paris

This, in part, helps to explain why, at the age of 58, Stein sat down to write The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas – the volume that would secure her lasting fame and fortune, even as it threatened to overshadow the more radical type of writing she spent decades perfecting.

Proud as she rightly was of her achievements, Stein had nonetheless struggled to persuade publishers to take her work seriously. Yet, as literary scholar Kristin Grogan observes, Stein always maintained her work “could be read by a general audience”. Faced with this impasse, she decided it was now or never.

Appearing in 1933, the Autobiography was a calculated departure from Stein’s earlier work. Accessible and ironic, the book is narrated from the perspective of Stein’s life partner, California-born Alice B. Toklas. Taken at face value, it offers readers a free-wheeling tour of bohemian Paris and its celebrities.

Yet there is far more to it than initially meets the eye: the text is a masterclass in ventriloquism, a memoir disguised as autobiographical reportage, in which Stein carefully constructs her own legend while seeming to stand aside. By writing in her lover’s voice, she found a way to narrate – and carefully curate – her own story without seeming to; the result is at once self-effacing and self-aggrandising, intimate and performative.

In Wade’s words, the book

is a joke, a myth, an audacious act of knowing artifice. It contravenes every rule of autobiography – and, in doing so, draws attention to its own act of creation.

Stein may have upended the rules yet again, but the general public couldn’t get enough. “For the first time in her career,” Wade reflects,

her writing was in demand – but the voice readers wanted was not her own. 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 comedic heroine of Alice B. Toklas’ fictional autobiography.

Riding the wave of the book’s runaway success, Stein returned to America for the first time in 30 years. Arriving in October 1934, she spent six months touring the country, delivering lectures and appearing before enthusiastic crowds. Feted as a bona fide celebrity, she took tea with Eleanor Roosevelt, paid a visit to F. Scott Fitzgerald and discussed cinema with Charlie Chaplin.

Though she relished the attention, her newfound fame left her in something of a quandary. As Wade writes, the Autobiography “had been marketed as a tell-all confessional affording privileged access to a coterie of celebrities”. The subtlety of Stein’s venture was lost on many:

At no point were readers informed that the Autobiography was written with cunning self-awareness and a large dose of irony: that it lampoons the very celebrity culture to which Stein had now fallen prey, which reduces artists to cartoonish, two-dimensional figures, and privileges the personality over the work.

Stein worried: “By writing as Alice B. Toklas, had she killed off Gertrude Stein?”

The American tour was followed by a prolonged period of self-reflection, where she mused about what her writing – and the practice of writing itself – meant.

Vichy France and Nazi pressure

Back in France, Stein spent the latter half of the 1930s producing a series of introspective, highly experimental works, “as she wrestled with her competing desires for solitude and for appreciation”. Then, in 1939, “her peaceful routines” were ruptured, as war loomed.

The outside world began to press in on the cherished domestic life Stein and Toklas had so carefully constructed. As the threat of Nazi Germany’s invasion of France came into sharper focus, she became fixated on astrological predictions and prophetic signs, retreating into bouts of wishful thinking.

But when Hitler invaded France in May 1940, illusion gave way to reality. French flags were replaced with Nazi swastikas. Clocks were set to Berlin time. Antisemitic flyers appeared on lampposts. Soldiers roamed the streets.

Out shopping in the commune of Belley, Stein and Toklas, who had for many years rented a house in the nearby hamlet of Bilignin, watched tanks rumble into the market square. A bridge was bombed. Curfews were imposed. Nightly blackouts became commonplace.

Despite the severity of the situation, Stein continued to cast about for sources of optimism. Like many others in France, she took solace in the figure of Philippe Pétain, who appeared to offer stability amid the chaos and uncertainty.

Hurriedly installed as the premier of France in the wake of the Nazi invasion, the 84-year-old former solider signed the Franco-German Armistice on June 22, 1940. With this act, France was split in two: the north was occupied by the Germans, while the south – soon known as Vichy France – remained nominally independent under Pétain’s rule.

The Vichy regime, far from being a passive puppet of the Third Reich, swiftly introduced its own antisemitic legislation – stripping Jews of citizenship, banning them from public service and facilitating deportations even before Nazi pressure demanded it.

Jewish lesbians surviving

Despite having the option to go back to the US, Stein and Toklas – now living under the Vichy regime – chose to stay in France. Their decision to stay, and the question of how they managed to survive the war unscathed, has long preoccupied critics and biographers alike. Janet Malcolm, for one, famously asked: “How had the pair of elderly Jewish lesbians survived the Nazis?”

It’s a question that continues to haunt Stein’s legacy. Published in 2007, Malcolm’s Two Lives is one of two major works Wade considers in detail when addressing this murky chapter of Stein’s life. The other is literary historian Barbara Will’s Unlikely Collaboration, which centres on Stein’s decades-long friendship with Bernard Faÿ, who would go on to become a powerful operator in the Vichy regime.

A historian of Franco-American relations, Faÿ, who helped organise Stein’s triumphant tour of America, played a prominent role in the regime’s anti-Masonic efforts – a sweeping crackdown that involved shuttering Masonic lodges, publishing lists of members and accusing Freemasons of anti-French conspiracies.

He was eventually convicted for his collaborationist activities and sentenced to prison, but escaped in September 1951. Wade details how, in a bizarre, almost unbelievable twist worthy of the detective novels Stein once devoured, it was none other than Alice B. Toklas who stumped up the funds that helped him cross into Switzerland, disguised as a Catholic priest.

Will is interested in not just what Stein may have done to protect herself during the war, but what that might mean when we read her work – and what we expect from our greatest writers.

She draws particular attention to the fact Stein translated dozens of politically reactionary and nationalistic speeches by Pétain, intended for publication in America. In the preface to her translation, Stein compared Pétain with George Washington as “first in war, first in peace and first in the hearts of countrymen.”

While these translations remain unpublished, Will argues – convincingly – that they reveal Stein as a willing propagandist for the Vichy regime. Her rigorously researched academic study raises uncomfortable questions about ethics, moral compromise and the troubling link between modern art and reactionary politics.

Needless to say, Unlikely Collaborations ignited a firestorm of controversy when it hit shelves in 2011. Some accused Will of tarnishing Stein’s name; others praised her for confronting aspects of Stein’s biography that had long been downplayed or simply ignored.

A reappraisal: art and politics

Wade revisits this scandal in the final chapter of Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife. Not to offer definitive judgement, but to reflect on some tensions that continue to shape how we understand Stein: as a writer and a person. Wade reminds us

Stein has always made people uncomfortable. Her detractors have consistently focused on her friendships, her looks, clichéd ideas of her style; anything but her writing. Her excesses – linguistic and bodily – have been seen as suspect, “ominous”, as though she must have something to hide.

She continues:

Discussions of artists with unsavoury politics or personal histories tend to hinge on how and whether art can be divorced from its maker, how enjoyment of a work can or should change if its creator is disgraced. But Stein’s work is usually considered dispensable in these conversations: derided, caricatured, flattened, as if it’s a relief to have a concrete reason to dismiss her.

It is to Wade’s utmost credit that she refuses this dismissal. She insists both Stein’s life and work “have far more to offer curious readers than these reductive approaches allow”.

By squarely acknowledging Stein’s very real personal shortcomings, while affirming the enduring vitality of her writing – dazzling, disorienting and difficult as it undoubtedly is – Wade’s biography makes a persuasive case for why Stein’s work continues to matter, “as new voices come into dialogue with it, drawing out different meanings and possibilities”.