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What is Two lives : Gertrude and Alice about?

<p><p>"How had the pair of elderly Jewish lesbians survived the Nazis?&#8221; 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 &#147;whose charm was as conspicuous as her fatness&#8221; and &#147;thin, plain, tense, sour&#8221; Alice B. Toklas, the &#147;worker bee&#8221; who ministered to Stein&#8217;s needs throughout their forty-year expatriate &#147;marriage.&#8221; As Malcolm pursues the truth of the couple&#8217;s charmed life in a village in Vichy France, her subject becomes the larger question of biographical truth. &#147;The instability of human knowledge is one of our few certainties,&#8221; she writes.&#160; <p>The portrait of the legendary couple that emerges from this work is unexpectedly charged. The two world wars Stein and Toklas&#160; lived through together are paralleled by the private war that went on between them. This war, as Malcolm learned, sometimes flared into bitter combat. <p><I>Two Lives</I> is also a work of literary criticism. &#147;Even the most hermetic of [Stein&#8217;s] writings are works of submerged autobiography,&#8221;

Author

Malcolm, Janet

Publisher

New Haven: Yale University Press

Published

2007

Language

EN

ISBN

9780300137712

Subjects

Memoir, Literary Criticism, History

Rating

3.59 / 5 (496 ratings)

Updated

2026-03-14