Gertrude, Mabel, May

Gertrude Stein’s first novel, one that was never published during her lifetime, was called Q.E.D. She wrote it to exorcise the experience of her first passionate love affair with the New Yorker May Bookstaver, the friend and lover of the Bostonian Mabel Haynes, a fellow student of Gertrude Stein’s at Johns Hopkins Medical School between 1898 and 1902. The impact of the complicated affair on Stein’s writing has attracted considerable attention but the subsequent lives of her two intimate friends have not been covered so far in any detailed way.

Gwendolyn Leick is the granddaughter of Mabel Haynes, who moved to Austria-Hungary in 1905. She began writing this book, after the chance discovery of her grandmother’s part in Gertrude Stein’s life some six years ago, in order to do justice to these remarkable women. The method of writing lays out the things, the notions and ideas, the people (friends, relatives, lovers, husbands), in the form of associative ‘entries’, woven around Gertrude Stein’s texts, as much as on private letters, photographs and other found objects. It is an encyclopaedic enterprise, rather than a chronologically ordered biographical account. The character and the lives of the three protagonists and the times they lived in emerge through the kaleidoscope of the accumulated vignettes.

CONTENTS
Alcohol 1
Analysis 2
Appetite 5
Arguments 7
Aristocrats 8
Aunts 12
Automobiles and airplanes 14
Alice B. Toklas 21
Baby 30
Baltimore, Maryland 32
Bilignin 36
Birthdays 38
Boston Marriages 42
Bryn Mawr 46
Busts 48
Cancer 52
Catholicism 55
Character 58
Charles E. Knoblauch 63
Childhood 67
Cigars and cigarettes 70
Clothes 71
Clubs 75
Communism and fascism 77
Cooking 81
Corsets 83
Countenance 86
Dance 89
Depression and the Great Depression 92
Doctors 96
Dogs 99
Dreams 106
Eating 110
Emma Lootz Erving 114
Fathers and daughters 122
Films 126
Friendship 132
Grace Constant Lounsbery 136
Hair 141
Handbags 146
Handwriting 148
Hats 151
Itha Heissig Thomas Karminski-Pielsticker 156
Jealousy 163
Jewellery 165
Jews 169
Konrad Heissig 174
Laughter 179
Letters 183
Mabel Foote Weeks 187
Marian Walker Williams 190
Money 193
Music 199
Negroes 203
Nerves 210
Pens and pencils 215
Perfume 217
Photographs 219
Reading 225
Romance 229
Rooms 232
Rudolf Franz Leick 237
Servants 242
Sex 248
Shoes and sandals 256
Sleep 260
Talking and listening 264
Teaching 268
Tempers and temperament 270
Votes for Women 274
Walking 278
Wars 281
Wives 290
Citations, Bibliography etc. 294