1920 Paris, 27, rue de Fleurus. Friends and strangers, aspiring writers and others, drop in around tea time at the Paris apartment of American Gertrude Stein, famous after having published the novel Three Lives in 1909 and the long prose poem Tender Buttons in 1914. Gertrude’s lover, Alice Toklas, serves cookies she has made and tea in white cups at the gatherings, for which no invitation is required. Gertrude talks about writing, about the importance of concentration, of tapping into the essence of being, or soul.

Gertrude’s experiments with language had established her as an important writer. “If Gertrude could write the poetry in Tender Buttons, then you could put just about anything on paper,” says Linda Wagner-Martin, professor of English, whose biography “Favored Strangers”: Gertrude Stein and Her Family, was published by Rutgers University Press in August 1995. “People had only to look at Gertrude,” Wagner-Martin says, “to see what was possible.”

Gertrude’s novels, plays, and short written “portraits” were typical of modernism, says Wagner-Martin.

“In the nineteenth century in America, most of our books dealt with the individual’s belief in a spiritual identity of some kind. That was the great theme-man and nature, man and god,” says Wagner-Martin. But modernists doubted that there was a god, and sought forms that expressed a hostility to the beliefs of the past, Wagner-Martin says. Tender Buttons was one such form. “Tender Buttons freed people’s imaginations,” Wagner-Martin says, “because it gave them the sense that language could be play.”

Gertrude’s present-day fame has resulted partly from her being seen as flamboyant and eccentric-the expatriate, lesbian, difficult-to-understand modernist writer, the woman whose walls were covered with the paintings of Matisse, Picasso, Cézanne, and Renoir. “I have a tape of Gertrude reading,” Wagner-Martin says. “She has a beautifully modulated voice, as though she’s had elocution lessons, as one growing up in the 1880s might have had. When you hear her voice, you know that you’re dealing with a middle-class, educated, Victorian lady, and that goes against all the stereotypes about Gertrude.

“I was trying to normalize Gertrude in a lot of ways,” Wagner-Martin says. “I tried to bring her back into the realm of real human being.”

1904 Paris, 27, rue de Fleurus. Gertrude, 30 years old, begins collecting art with her older brothers Leo and Michael, and Michael’s wife, Sally. The Steins have a modest family trust, and they begin to spend most of their income buying paintings.

“The Steins were never wealthy,” says Wagner-Martin. “Most people think of them as being very wealthy, because how else could they have this art?”

While most art collectors of the day rely on advice from artists or critics, the Steins make their own decisions about what to buy. Leo becomes infamous in 1905 when he buys Matisse’s widely ridiculed painting, Woman with the Hat. Between 1904 and 1908, the Steins buy many works by new painters, including Picasso and Renoir. They rarely spend more than $200 on a painting, except for Cézanne’s works. The Steins quickly acquire so many controversial paintings that they become known as “The Stein Corporation.”

By 1908, the Steins’ phase of rapid collecting is over. Matisse, Picasso, Cézanne, and Renoir’s reputations are established, and their paintings are mostly out of the reach of the Steins’ meager income. For the rest of their lives, the Steins sell off their paintings to buy new paintings, or to supplement their fixed monthly income.

In her Paris salons in the 1920s, Gertrude is the center of attention, a commanding figure. “How did this woman get to be so confident?” says Wagner-Martin, sitting in her office in front of a wall covered with books. “Gertrude was very confident as a child. She’s fine until she’s about eleven, and then her world collapses on her.”

1884 Oakland, California, 461 East Twelfth Street. Gertrude’s mother becomes sick with cancer. As her illness worsens, she begins taking morphine. When Gertrude is 14, her mother dies. Following the death, family routine breaks down: the children, Bertha, Simon, Leo, Michael, and Gertrude, stay up late, and there are no regular mealtimes. Gertrude’s high school burns down in 1889. She reads daily in libraries, but does not enroll in another school, and never graduates from high school. When Gertrude is 16, her father dies. Gertrude, Leo, and Bertha board with relatives in Baltimore.

1897 Baltimore, Maryland, 215 East Biddle Street. Gertrude has spent four happy and productive years at Radcliffe, where she was admitted despite her ninth-grade education. She enrolls at Johns Hopkins medical school. Eleven of the 63 medical students in Gertrude’s class are female. Many of the male students do not like having women in the program: female students record being hit by missiles of paper, tinfoil, tobacco quids. Professors make sexist comments. For example, Professor William Osler often remarks, “Human beings may be divided into three groups: men, women, and women physicians.”

Gertrude begins to do less and less, cutting classes and claiming apathy. In her third year of medical school, her grades slip in her fourth year, she fails two courses. To finish her degree, she has only to take a summer school course. Gertrude refuses to do so. “You don’t know how little I like pathological psychology and how all medicine bores me,” Gertrude reportedly tells her professor.

Wagner-Martin tries to understand what was going on with Gertrude those last two years at Johns Hopkins. The youngest child in her family, Gertrude was accustomed to being the center of attention, and the sexist, unsupportive medical school environment did not bring out her best. In addition, Gertrude fell in love during her junior year with May Bookstaver, a Bryn Mawr graduate in Baltimore who was involved with another woman.

“So occupied was Gertrude with her love affair that she had no energy left for study,” Wagner-Martin writes. “Her pretended boredom was a mask for sexual frustration.” After Johns Hopkins, Gertrude moves to London to live with Leo.

“I wish I had been able to find more about the year when Gertrude and Leo are living in London, before they move to Paris,” Wagner-Martin says. “After the debacle of her last year at Johns Hopkins, it sounds to me as if Gertrude is having, if not a full fledged breakdown, certainly, problems with depression, because she just doesn’t see any direction. But, she seems never to have had that depression again. And that’s partly because of the support of Alice.”

1907 Paris, 27, rue de Fleurus. Gertrude, 33, meets Alice Toklas, newly arrived in Paris from California. Gertrude courts Alice, and the two become inseparable. In 1910, Alice moves in with Gertrude and Leo. In 1913, Leo moves out. Until the end of Gertrude’s life, Alice and Gertrude will live together as a married couple.

“You’re never going to get at the real intimacy of their relationship, because especially when people live together all the time, they don’t write to each other,” Wagner-Martin says. “What biographers want are relationships among people who live across the continent.” With little correspondence to consult, Wagner-Martin turned to Gertrude’s manuscripts.

“There are handwritten manuscripts of everything Gertrude wrote, in notebooks, thousands of pages,” Wagner-Martin says. “You read those knowing that Alice types those things up. In a few cases, I compared the notebook version to the first typed version. I made four separate trips to Yale, and was there at least a week each time, and doing nothing, all the hours the library’s open, except comparing these manuscripts. I was looking for what Alice’s involvement in the actual writing might be, Alice’s changes that might be some kind of significant dialogue back to Gertrude. However, I couldn’t find very many times when Alice changed anything.”

The lack of knowledge about the interaction between Gertrude and Alice frustrated Wagner-Martin. “You’d like to know the whole story, every nuance of it, and you just can’t,” Wagner-Martin says. “What do you do when everybody covers their tracks? You cannot go back to that time.”

There were other obstacles, as well. Records from Pittsburgh, where Gertrude’s parents lived for the first ten years of their marriage, were lost in a fire. “I had to use Gertrude’s mother’s diary, even for their marriage date,” Wagner-Martin says. “Biographers want to know for sure. What if there hadn’t ever been a wedding? These assumptions are dangerous. We’re missing information, from a very factual level to our not having a lot of dialogue between Gertrude and Alice because they were together every minute of every day for the most part.”

Wagner-Martin is not sure who the subject of her next biography will be, but like Gertrude, it will be someone people want to read about. “You could write the best biography in the world, and if nobody reads it, you might as well forget it,” Wagner-Martin says. “I do not write books for my bottom desk drawer.”