A Legacy Of Lesbian Love Letters (No 9) - DEAR SAPPHO

Gertrude Stein with Alice Tsoclas

1940
My love my love, I love my love,
My love I love, I love my love,
Bless her, her little fingers and her
big finger and her whole hand and all 
of her bless her, I love my love bless
her and the two little apples inside her
bless her, and the cow that comes out
with her, bless her, I love
my love, my 
love I love, bless her.



GERTRUDE TO ALICE
The writer Gertrude Stein and her lover Alice B. Tsoclas are certainly preeminent in their status as the lesbian couple of the 20th century.


From the book
DEAR SAPPHO A Legacy of Lesbian Love Letters
by KAY TURNER
Published by: THAMES AND HUDSON, 1996
info

Gertrude Stein (February 3, 1874 – July 27, 1946) was an American writer and thinker who spent most of her life in France. She was well known due to her writing, art collection and the many people (some of whom were, or became, famous) who visited her Paris salon.

Her adult life featured two main personal relationships. The first was her working relationship with her brother Leo Stein, from 1874 to 1914, and the second was her romantic relationship with Alice B. Toklas, from 1907 until Stein's death in 1946. Stein shared her salon at 27 rue de Fleurus, Paris, first with Leo and then with Alice. Throughout her lifetime, Stein also had significant relationships with avant garde artists and literary people. She was friends with young artists Matisse and Picasso during the early 1900s, authors Thornton Wilder and Ernest Hemingway during the 1920s. She is credited with coining the term Lost Generation as description of her many expatriate acquaintances in France and Italy during the 1920s and 1930s.

Alice B. Toklas (April 30, 1877 – March 7, 1967) was an American-born member of the Parisian avant-garde of the early 20th Century. She was born Alice Babette Toklas in San Francisco, California into a middle-class Jewish family and attended schools in both San Francisco and Seattle. For a short time she also studied music at the University of Washington. She met Stein in Paris on September 8, 1907 on the first day that she arrived. Together they hosted a salon that attracted expatriate American writers, such as Ernest Hemingway, Paul Bowles, Thornton Wilder and Sherwood Anderson, and avant-garde painters, including Picasso, Matisse and Braque.

Acting as Stein's confidante, lover, cook, secretary, muse, editor, critic, and general organizer, Toklas remained a background figure, chiefly living in the shadow of Stein, until Stein published her memoirs in 1933 under the teasing title The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. It became Stein's bestselling book. The two were a couple until Gertrude Stein's death in 1946

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