Gertrude Stein had no doubt that she was a genius. “I have been the creative literary mind of the century,” she once boasted. “Think of the Bible and Homer think of Shakespeare and think of me.” Some years earlier, she informed a baffled magazine editor who had rejected her writing that she was producing “the only important literature that has come out of America since Henry James.” She knew her work was unconventional—repetitive, hermetic, its apparent crudeness belying immense psychological and literary sophistication—but was supremely confident that, in time, it would be recognized as something of enduring cultural value. “For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause everybody accepts,” she observed in 1926 about the reception of avant-garde art. There was no question in her mind that her own contribution would eventually be accepted: She simply had to wait.

But what do you do while you’re waiting around to become a classic? And how can you help the process along? Francesca Wade’s Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife is an attempt to answer that question. The book is a biography of Stein, but an oddly structured one, in which the subject dies about halfway through. “Biography, like detective fiction, tends to begin with a corpse,” Wade writes (a killer line), “but Stein well knew that a writer’s life does not end at death, if their work has the power to survive them.” Stein, she contends, was unusually concerned with her posthumous reputation: Having accepted that her work wasn’t destined to be appreciated in her lifetime, she put her faith in posterity. “Those who are creating the modern composition authentically are naturally only of importance when they are dead,” Stein once wrote. Accordingly, she spent a good portion of her life making arrangements for her afterlife.

The first half of Wade’s book is a detailed but necessarily compressed account of Stein’s remarkable, if already well-chronicled, existence. In its second half, though, Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife becomes something trickier and more original: a narrative about literary scholarship, and the discomforts it can cause those left behind to tend a legacy. Stein—whose work was a mystery to so many and yet encoded facts about her personal life that would have been unspeakable during her lifetime—turns out to be the perfect case study for such an investigation.

Stein was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, in 1874, the child of well-heeled second-generation German Jewish immigrants. When Gertrude was five, the family relocated to Oakland, California, where her father made his fortune investing in the nascent public transportation industry. (The adult Stein’s famous pronouncement on Oakland—“There is no there there”—is one of several Steinisms that has achieved proverbial status.) Gertrude, the youngest of five children, was called “Baby,” a nickname she retained for the rest of her life. She was cosseted and indulged by her parents and siblings, establishing a lifelong pattern of contented dependence on the ministrations of others. “It is better if you are the youngest girl in a family to have a brother two years older,” she wrote of her early bond with her brother Leo, “because that makes everything a pleasure to you, you go everywhere and do everything while he does it all for and with you which is a pleasant way to have everything happen to you.”

Gertrude showed early signs of intellectual distinction—she was a strong student, and spent much of her free time at the public library consuming vast quantities of eighteenth-century literature—and in 1893 she was admitted to the Harvard Annex, soon to be renamed Radcliffe College. There she studied with the famed psychologist William James, who called her his “most brilliant woman student,” and began conducting research on automatic writing that presaged her later literary experiments with documenting consciousness. James encouraged her to attend medical school at Johns Hopkins, which she briefly did, but she soon grew bored and decided to join Leo in Europe, where he was pursuing a career as a painter. By the fall of 1903, Gertrude and Leo were living together in Paris on the rue de Fleurus, where they hosted a glittering salon that attracted avant-garde artists such as Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso.

Seeing the astonishing innovations in painting of the time encouraged Stein, who was already........

© New Republic