The text and “The Presence”: Gertrude Stein’s archives

Following the renovation of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Papers, including a wealth of digitised material and slick online finding aid, has never been so accessible. This huge repository is augmented by the Yale Collection of American Literature, alongside significant collections with improved online catalogues at the Harry Ransom Center, the University of Virginia and UC Berkeley. This chapter considers the way these holdings have been deployed in addressing the tensions between the historically situated author and her literary experimentation. Over decades of scholarship, Stein has been read alternatively as avant-garde radical, as lesbian feminist, as high-modernist salonnière, as Vichy collaborator, with the archives repeatedly re-illuminated in search of these Steins. As the latest scholarship returns to the texts and seeks a more granular view of their publication contexts, the chapter considers what the newly accessible archive might mean for Stein research today.