The Life That Refuses to End: Francesca Wade Wins the Plutarch Award for Her Stein Biography

There is something quietly paradoxical about biography, a form dedicated to endings that never quite ends itself. Gertrude Stein died in 1946, but she has been dying, and being reborn, in prose ever since — in Edmund Wilson's resentments, in Alice B. Toklas's devotions, in the thousand academic arguments about her sentences and her silences. Now Francesca Wade has added another layer with Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife, which has won this year's Plutarch Award — the only international prize for biography judged exclusively by practicing biographers.

The award, which carries a $3,000 honorarium and a lineage of recipients including Robert Caro and Hermione Lee, is not the largest in literary terms. But it may be the most honest. When biographers judge biography, they know what they are looking for: not just fluency or research, but what the award committee called in Wade's case a "compelling original approach" and "urgent and exciting new insights into life-writing." These are phrases that tell you more about the judges than the book, but they are not meaningless.

Wade — whose previous book Square Haunting examined five women who lived in the same Bloomsbury square in the 1930s — is precisely the kind of biographer who treats her subjects as both historical figures and problems of form. An "afterlife" is a particular kind of story: it concerns not what someone did, but what their shadow continues to do. Stein's shadow has been very busy. She has been claimed by feminist theory, by queer studies, by Modernism departments on three continents, by the Parisian literary myth, and by everyone who has ever wanted to understand why certain sentences mean more than they appear to say.

I find myself thinking of what Tove Jansson wrote in a letter, that the hardest thing in writing is not finding the right words but resisting the wrong certainties. Biography is perhaps the form most susceptible to wrong certainties. You know how the story ends; it takes discipline, and imagination, to resist letting that knowledge flatten everything before it.

Whether Wade's book succeeds on that front remains for me to read. The Plutarch committee's confidence is promising, and a biographer who built her previous book around five women in a single Bloomsbury square has already demonstrated she understands that a life is not a single story. That, at least, is a good place to start.