Two lives : Gertrude and Alice

Resource Information

The work Two lives : Gertrude and Alice represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in University of Liverpool. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

Two lives : Gertrude and Alice

Title remainder

Gertrude and Alice

Statement of responsibility

Janet Malcolm

Creator

• Malcolm, Janet

Subject

• Authors, American -- 20th century -- Biography
• Paris (France) -- Intellectual life -- 20th century
• Stein, Gertrude, 1874-1946
• Stein, Gertrude, 1874-1946.
• Toklas, Alice B
• Americans -- France | Paris -- History -- 20th century

Genre

• Biography

Language

eng

Summary

'How had the pair of elderly Jewish lesbians survived the Nazis?' Janet Malcolm asks at the beginning of this extraordinary work of literary biography and investigative journalism. The pair, of course, is Gertrude Stein, the modernist master 'whose charm was as conspicuous as her fatness' and 'thin, plain, tense, sour' Alice B. Toklas, the 'worker bee' who ministered to Stein's needs throughout their forty-year expatriate 'marriage'. As Malcolm pursues the truth of the couple's charmed life in a village in Vichy France, her subject becomes the larger question of biographical truth. 'The instability of human knowledge is one of our few certainties', she writes. The portrait of the legendary couple that emerges from this work is unexpectedly charged. The two world wars Stein and Toklas lived through together are paralleled by the private war that went on between them. This war, as Malcolm learned, sometimes flared into bitter combat."Two Lives" is also a work of literary criticism. 'Even the most hermetic of Stein's writings are works of submerged autobiography', Malcolm writes. 'The key of "I" will not unlock the door to their meaning - you need a crowbar for that - but will sometimes admit you to a kind of anteroom of suggestion'. Whether unpacking the accessible "Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas", in which Stein 'solves the koan of autobiography', or wrestling with "The Making of Americans", a masterwork of 'magisterial disorder', Malcolm is stunningly perceptive

Member of

• Online access with subscription: Proquest Ebook Central

Biography type

individual biography

Cataloging source

CaPaEBR

Dewey number

818.5209

Illustrations

illustrations

Index

no index present

LC call number

PS3537.T323

LC item number

Z7137 2007eb

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

• standards specifications
• bibliography