Two lives : Gertrude and Alice
Two Lives is Janet Malcolm's portrait of a legendary couple: Gertrude Stein, the modernist master, and Alice B Toklas, the 'worker bee' who ministered to Stein's needs throughout their forty-year expatriate 'marriage'. As Malcolm pursues the truth of the couple's charmed life in a village in Vichy France her subject becomes the larger question of biographical truth. 'The instability of human knowledge is one of our few certainties,' she writes. The portrait of their relationship that emerges is unexpectedly charged. The two world wars Stein and Toklas lived through together are paralleled by the private war that went on between them. This war, as Malcolm learned, sometimes flared into bitter combat.--dustjacket
Print Book, English, 2007
Australian ed View all formats and editions
Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Vic., 2007
Biographies
229 p. : ports. ; 21 cm.
9780522854367, 0522854362
1058308542
Previously published: New Haven, Yale University Press, 2007