Francesca Wade is the author of “Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife,” her acclaimed biography of the iconic 20th-century author, art collector, and personality (which was also one of our picks for the best books of 2025). Wade is also the author of “Square Haunting: Five Women, Freedom and London Between the Wars,” and her work has appeared in the New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, Paris Review and Granta. Here, she takes the Book Pages Q&A about her work and her reading life.
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Q. Please tell readers about your new book, “Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife.”
My book is a biography of the radical American writer, art collector and salonnière Gertrude Stein. The first half explores Stein’s fascinating life, leaning on the way she told her own story in her self-mythologising memoir, “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas,” while the second half – following Toklas in the 20 years she lived on after Stein’s death – traces Stein’s efforts to secure her posthumous legacy, introducing the first biographers who came to rifle through the voluminous archive she left behind.
Q. Stein is remembered in various ways, often in terms of her relationships with other artists, but how do you think we should think about her now?
Stein declared that she “came to Paris to kill the nineteenth century.” She was deeply frustrated that press coverage – of which she received a huge amount – tended to focus on her eccentric, larger-than-life personality and on the men she gathered around her: Picasso, Hemingway, Fitzgerald. But I think Stein was right that her most important legacy lies in her innovative writing – texts which go further than anyone else, before or since, to question the relationship between language and reality. Her work has been hugely influential to later generations of avant-garde artists – John Cage, the Language Poets, the Fluxus and Happenings artists – and I hope my book will help shift some interest away from her persona (fascinating though it is!) and back towards her work.
Q. What were you most surprised to learn about Stein or her partner, Alice B. Toklas, while doing your research?
Stein and Toklas’s relationship is so storied, even caricatured: many friends who describe seeing them in public raised eyebrows at their gendered dynamics, with Stein almost cartoonishly dominant and Toklas (who opened the door to guests, typed Stein’s work, and managed the household) so subservient. People speculated that she really held the power behind closed doors. But material in Stein’s archive, and newly released interviews Toklas gave after Stein’s death, allowed me to tell a different story of their relationship, and to read it as a real collaboration between two very different but equal partners, making a life together built around art.
Q. I think a lot of readers would be interested in your book, “Square Haunting,” if they’ve not yet read it. Could you share a little bit about it?
“Square Haunting” is a group biography of five women writers who all lived in Mecklenburgh Square, in London’s Bloomsbury, at various times between the two world wars. I write about the poet Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), the detective novelist Dorothy L. Sayers, the historians Jane Ellen Harrison and Eileen Power, and Virginia Woolf, whose ideas of “a room of one’s own” in a way hold the book together. They’re all fascinating characters, and I discovered many intriguing overlaps between their lives and their work.
Q. Is there a topic you’ll always read about?
I’m always drawn to books about biography, which dramatize in interesting ways the strange business of transforming the messiness of a life into an ostensibly orderly narrative. Janet Malcolm’s “The Silent Woman” is one of the most serious examinations of biography I’ve ever read. I also love A. S. Byatt’s “Possession” and A.J.A. Symons’ “The Quest for Corvo,” which capture the thrill – and surreal aspects – of the biographical quest.
Q. Is there a book or books you always recommend to other readers?
Recently, I’ve been recommending Norman Rush’s “Mating,” an inspired recommendation from a friend a few years ago – the kind of knotty, hefty novel you can really sink into, and its narrator is one of the most memorable voices I’ve ever met in fiction.
Q. How do you decide what to read next?
I’m lucky in that my research is always throwing up new writers to discover – while working on Stein, I read lots of books by her friends. I especially loved discovering the works of Janet Flanner, the New Yorker’s longtime Paris correspondent, and the memoirs of Samuel Steward, a fascinating character who also made Stein and Toklas the stars of a couple of very strange detective novels.
Q. What are you reading now?
I’m about to go to Australia for the first time, so I’m reading Elizabeth Harrower’s “The Watch Tower,” a brilliant and brutal novel set in 1940s Sydney. It’s a beautifully and very powerfully written parable of a terrible marriage, setting the stakes for personal freedom.
Q. Do you have a favorite character or quote from a book?
Fevvers, the “Cockney Venus” from Angela Carter’s “Nights at the Circus,” is an exuberant aerialiste who claimed to be hatched from an egg: a glorious creation as inventive with her own history as her creator was with language.
Q. Do you have any favorite book covers?
Stein and Toklas set up their own publishing house to print Stein’s work when no one else would. They called it the Plain Edition, and the covers took inspiration from the notebooks Stein wrote in, as if readers were receiving work directly from her pen. I love this very minimalist design – which has been taken up more recently by Gallimard in France and Fitzcarraldo Editions in the UK – and its implicit promise that it’s what’s inside that counts – and won’t disappoint.
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