Gertrude Stein
...in love in 1864. They had seven children. One of their children, Gertrude Stein, was born on February 3, 1874. Her father thought of Gertrude as ‘a perfect baby’.
Stein – who hated school – never graduated, but by the time she was eighteen, she was an exceedingly smart individual. In 1891, Leo began to go to Harvard and Michael decided to have the ladies live with their aunt, which was a wonderful idea because that is when Stein began to feel better about her but she missed Leo too much. So she went to visit him and at the time, the University had a professor called William James, who wrote the book Principles of Psychology. He was an excellent professor and he was also the reason Stein enrolled in at the Harvard Annex in 1893.
Stein and Toklas first met in 1907, at Stein’s sister-in-law party, they felt an instant connection from that moment on. Stein would be telling stories about Paris and it caught Toklas’s interest. Toklas left her boring San Francisco life as a housewife to her brothers and father to go to Paris and live with Stein. They both agreed that they wanted to live a life worth living with plenty of food, the company of artists and writers, and not to do things they didn’t want to do. Stein and Toklas lived that life for 39 years. To make their relationship official, Stein proposed to Toklas while on a trip to Tuscany. They lived has husband and wife. As quoted by Diana Souhami, “she with a sheet if linen and he with a sheet of paper”. Stein and Toklas used to scatter love notes around the house signed Dear Dear and Your Dear. Stein had many private references to her love for Toklas. The ones who were mutual friends to the couple thought that they real good friends but they were lovers.
In the 1920s, she tried to connect her theories of cubism to literature, like in the essay Composition As Explanation. In 1925, The Making if Americans: Being...
View Full Essay