Gertrude Stein, Laura Riding and The Space of Letters

Abstract

Near the end of Gertrude Stein's American lecture tour (1934–35), she turned her attention to letter writing: because of the writer's consciousness of an audience, she says, letters could never be the purely creative work that her prose poems were, but they usefully put some space between writer and reader. This essay proposes that Stein then wrote Everybody's Autobiography (1937) as a semi-public news-letter. Earlier, in 1930, Laura Riding had tried to interest Stein in the epistolary genre. One of Riding's projects at that time was a collection of letters, which she titled Everybody's Letters (1933). Putting Everybody's Letters and Everybody's Autobiography into dialogue with one another, this essay suggests that what Riding says about letters in her collection anticipates many of the qualities found in Stein's book.

Abstract