The Architect of Her Own Legend: Francesca Wade and Lara Pawson on Gertrude Stein’s Enduring Afterlife

In May 2025, biographer Francesca Wade and writer Lara Pawson took the stage at London Review Bookshop to explore Gertrude Stein’s extraordinary self-fashioning and the myths that continue to shape her legacy. Drawing on Wade’s acclaimed new biography Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife, the conversation reveals Stein not merely as a modernist icon but as a shrewd architect of her own reputation — while Pawson illuminates the radical power of her experimental prose. The discussion, now available as a podcast, offers fresh insight into one of the 20th century’s most confounding literary figures.

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On a spring evening in 2025, the London Review Bookshop buzzed with anticipation. Readers, writers, and admirers of modernism gathered to hear Francesca Wade discuss her latest book, Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife, in conversation with Lara Pawson. What unfolded was far more than a routine book talk. It became a layered meditation on fame, language, survival, and the stories we tell about literary giants after they are gone.

Wade, whose previous work Square Haunting brilliantly traced the intersecting lives of women writers in Bloomsbury, approaches Stein with the same blend of scholarly rigor and narrative warmth. Rather than delivering another cradle-to-grave biography, she examines the “afterlife” — the deliberate and sometimes contested construction of Stein’s reputation following her death in 1946. Stein, Wade shows, was an active participant in her own myth-making long before she died. From her Paris salon, where she positioned herself at the center of modern art alongside Picasso, Matisse, and Hemingway, to her strategic decision to archive her papers at Yale, Stein worked tirelessly to ensure she would be remembered as modernism’s true originator.

The 1933 bestseller The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas — written by Stein in Toklas’s voice — marked her breakthrough into public consciousness. What many readers took as a charming portrait of bohemian life was, in Wade’s telling, a masterful act of self-presentation. Yet the book also hints at deeper emotional currents in the relationship between Stein and Toklas. Unpublished notes and archival material reveal moments of tension that may have prompted the autobiography as both declaration and reconciliation.

One of the most compelling — and uncomfortable — threads in the discussion concerned Stein’s wartime years. She and Toklas, both Jewish, remained in occupied France under the protection of Vichy authorities and the controversial figure Bernard Faÿ, a collaborator and antisemite who had translated Stein’s work. Wade handles this period with nuance, drawing on evidence to portray a complex mix of pragmatism, political naivety, and denial rather than outright collaboration. It is a reminder that even towering cultural figures were not immune to the moral ambiguities of their time.

Lara Pawson, the evening’s interlocutor, brought a different but equally vital energy to the conversation. A novelist and essayist with a deep affinity for radical forms, Pawson has written admiringly about Stein’s repetitive, rhythmic prose — describing works like the 1923 portrait “If I Told Him” (of Picasso) as something akin to an electroencephalogram of the mind. For Pawson, Stein’s style is not merely experimental quirk but a courageous attempt to capture thought as it actually unfolds: instinctive, circling, unfiltered. She encouraged the audience to resist easy labels like “cubist writing” and instead feel the meditative, almost hypnotic quality of Stein’s language.

Listening to the recorded podcast now (available via the London Review Bookshop site, Apple, and Spotify), one senses the genuine intellectual spark between the two women. Wade provides the meticulous historical scaffolding; Pawson supplies the poetic appreciation of form. Together they portray Stein as both celebrity salonnière and serious literary innovator — a woman who understood the power of narrative, whether in life, on the page, or in the archive.

Wade’s book has been praised for its fresh structure and depth, earning her the 2026 Plutarch Award. It invites readers to see Stein’s legacy as something continually reshaped by scholars, executors, and new generations of admirers. For those new to Stein, the conversation serves as an excellent entry point; for longtime readers, it offers renewed provocation.

In the end, the evening left a lasting impression: Gertrude Stein remains rowdy, confounding, and irresistibly alive precisely because she refused to let others write her story. Through Wade’s careful excavation and Pawson’s perceptive reading, we see how a determined American expatriate engineered an afterlife that continues to challenge and inspire nearly eighty years after her death.

If you care about modernism, experimental writing, or the intricate dance between life and reputation, both the book and the podcast are essential. Stein’s legend was no accident — and thanks to Wade and Pawson, we understand exactly how deliberately it was built.