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Baby Precious Always Shines: Selected Love Notes Between Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas
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About Baby Precious Always Shines: Selected Love Notes
Product Description Off and on, during the entire period they were together, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas wrote each other little love notes. Calling her "wifey" and most often addressing her as "baby precious," Stein scribbled her love for Toklas in quick moments of unself-conscious desire. And on occasion, Toklas penned or typed letters back to her "husband." Because the couple was virtually inseparable, the notes were written and exchanged at home. Baby Precious Always Shines presents selections from this previously unpublished correspondence. In first-person documentation, in direct address, these brief mantralike enticements—tender, beseeching, funny and game, sexually charged and sincere, quotidian and queer—disclose the intimacies of a deeply committed, very rare, and at the same time, very ordinary marriage between two of the twentieth century's most famous women. Toklas called their notes "a beautiful form of literature." They are indeed, and when pieced together, they create a tantalizing mosaic, a portrait of a marriage that helped shape the course of modernism and modern lesbianism. Review "Edited skillfully . . . These letters illuminate the inseparability of female creativity and profound relationships among women. These scraps and scrawls of love . . . are intrinsically helpful biographically."—Catharine R. Stimpson, The Women's Review of Books "These 'precious' moments will delight the Steinophiles."— Minneapolis Star Tribune "Turner has unearthed a treasury of ephemera . . . Erotic without being explicit, affectionate but not schmaltzy, these notes are a testament to a physical, enduring love. What better way to start the new century than with a record of one of the great lesbian couples of the previous one."—Sarah Chinn, The Advocate "The collection makes a convincing case for Toklas's assertion that 'notes are a very beautiful form of literature'—personal, provocative, and tender."— Kirkus Reviews "Fans and scholars will greet [this collection] with the enthusiasm of an anthropologist discovering the ledger books of a lost tribe . . . These behind-the-scenes materials reveal a relationship much more complex than an imitation heterosexual marriage."— Library Journal "At last, what I always longed for, an intimate and revealing portrait of Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas's relationship, painted by the couple themselves. That should put an end to the question: but what can two women do together? Along with Kay Turner's informative and provocative introduction, these letters will fascinate all Stein scholars and aficionados."—Esther Newton, author of Cherry Grove, Fire Island and Mother Camp "Spontaneous, playful, and decidedly physical, the love notes between Gertrude and Alice offer delight after delight. They afford us a privileged, close look at the mutual desire and devotion of the two most famous lesbians of the twentieth century. Kay Turner's insightful introduction illuminates the genius of their reinvention of marriage and makes clear how deeply rooted Stein's body of writing is in the steady daily intimacy of their shared life. A gem of a book."—Joan Larkin, author of Cold River and editor of A Woman Like That "Baby Precious gleams from the stunning title to the final photo of Gertrude, Alice, Basket the poodle, and Pepe the Chihuahua. Reflective of one of the twentieth century's great love stories, the collection makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the relation between the aesthetic and the erotic, the literary and the quotidian, in the particular context of lesbian self-fashioning."—Elizabeth Meese, author of (Sem)Erotics: Theorizing Lesbian: Writing and (Ex)Tensions: Re-Figuring Feminist Criticism "Gertrude Stein—that progenitor of modernism and master of the elliptical—has been, for almost a century, a writer of endless surprise and astonishment. The resonance and meaning embedded in her seemingly guileless wordplay (which is anything but guileless)
