Hermione Lee’s NYRB review (February 12, 2026 issue; archived) of Francesca Wade’s new life of Gertrude Stein starts with a pleasing quotation:
As part of her account of how amazingly well-known Gertrude Stein had become in America by the mid-1930s, Francesca Wade refers to, but doesn’t quote, this exchange from Top Hat (1935) in which Ginger Rogers’s dressmaker is reading her a telegram:
“Come ahead Stop. Stop being a sap Stop… My husband is stopping at your hotel Stop. When do you start Stop.” I cannot understand who wrote this.
Rogers: Sounds like Gertrude Stein.
The review is admirably even-handed, and anyone interested in Stein and her shifting reputation might want to read it; I’ll post a couple more bits I liked. After mentioning Stein’s bullying father, she quotes this, from Everybody’s Autobiography (1937):
Fathers are depressing. There is too much fathering going on just now…. There is father Mussolini and father Hitler…and father Stalin…. Fathers are depressing.
Perhaps a touch overgeneralized, but one can sympathize. And this is a delicate skewering:
Sometimes the praise feels excessively solemn, as when Wade comments on Stein’s late-1920s essays on grammar: “She moved increasingly away from nouns, whose meanings were disappointingly preordained, and from punctuation, which she found didactic.”
In 1934, Stein had done a lecture tour associated with Autobiography and appeared on the cover of Time (Sep 11). Also in 1935 was Man on the Flying Trapeze, where W. C. Fields’s wife reads at breakfast, “one of those delightful fragments by Gertrude Smuden”: “We have what we have not. What we have not we have. Up is down, down is out, …”
Judith Thurman’s review of Wade’s biography in The New Yorker begins by relating her experiences receiving The World is Round as a child, a children’s book illustrated by Clement Hurd that Margaret Wise Brown persuaded Stein to do for W. R. Scott.
Astaire’s dancing is a joy, but he was evidently regularly a jerk to Rogers; in this case about the ostrich feathers from her “Cheek to Cheek” gown that got everywhere. It’s also maybe telling how he was supposedly intimidated by Eleanor Powell, perhaps his only costar who was a better dancer.