Favoured Strangers

By Linda Wagner Martin

The standard version of Gertrude Stein’s life – the story of the idiosyncratic art collector and writer, ruling the expatriates in Paris – has been told so often that it has become a piece of Americana. With extensive original research, this new biography breaks with that tradition. Find Gertrude Stein as you’ve never seen her before: as a member of her German-Jewish patriarchal family, as an odd sort of feminist, as a medical student at Johns Hopkins University, as a lesbian and a lover, as an art collector and as a war survivor.