The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

 “A Room of One’s Own” by Virginia Woolf (1929)

This seminal feminist essay addresses the importance of privacy for women writers and their need to find a refuge from domestic tasks. The essay also imagines that if Shakespeare had had a sister with talent equal to his own, her contemporary society would have made it impossible for her to write and fulfill her potential.

• A Room of One’s Own on SuperSummary

What Is Remembered by Alice Babette Toklas (1963)

This is Toklas’s autobiography, which includes descriptions of her San Francisco childhood and her life with Stein. It provides more intimate details of their relationship than Stein’s account in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.

“Orientalism” by Edward Said (1978)

This is a seminal text on how cultural critics from the Western world created notions of difference between themselves and the global East. The set of oppositions between East and West show Westerners attributing to the East and other non-white cultures the qualities that they disown in themselves. The oppositions are founded on a myth of Western superiority.

“How a Book by Gertrude Stein Taught Me to Write About Myself” by Deborah Levy (2020)