What to do with Gertrude Stein? Decades after her death, she still bestrides the literary landscape like a mastodon, impossible to ignore, determined to take up space. A confrere of Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Ernest Hemingway (until she fell out with the latter), she was an enigmatic creature—overtly masculine, her hair shorn like a Roman emperor’s, her stout body clad in corduroy robes and, later, in tweed suits designed by her friend Pierre Balmain. Stein assiduously created her own mystique; she had every wish attended to by her devoted companion of nearly four decades, the mustached Alice B. Toklas, who was a wizard in the kitchen and kept a grim watch over the many inquisitive visitors to their salons at 27 Rue de Fleurus in Paris. For me, the essential question about Stein has always been and continues to be this: Does her enduring reputation owe more to her importance as a daring modernist, in the league of James Joyce and T. S. Eliot, or to her penchant for marketing herself as a genius, despite a woeful inability, with one or two exceptions, to write readable prose?

Francesca Wade’s new book, Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife, is the latest entry in a trove of essays, critical studies, and biographies about this eccentric and dominating personage. Wade’s first book, Square Haunting, focuses on a group of female intellectuals, including Virginia Woolf, who moved to London’s Mecklenburgh Square in search of greater freedom, and showcases her skills as a researcher and writer. It has a clear thesis and a fluid trajectory, and carries its erudition lightly. An Afterlife is equally well researched—Wade had access to Stein’s voluminous papers, stored at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library—but is less assured and less sonorously written; much of the ground that it