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Sophie Oliver takes us inside the remarkable home of the American novelist, poet and playwright Gertrude Stein and her partner Alice Toklas in Paris to look at the material objects they cherished - from an embroidered waistcoat that Alice made for Gertrude, to a series of stationary items branded with her famous line ‘Rose is a Rose is a Rose’, and a fabric sculpture of their pet poodle, Basket, that Picasso made for Gertrude by way of an apology.

Using the objects, she takes listeners inside 27 rue de Fleurus, and into Stein’s artistic and literary world, a world which expands well beyond Paris; her queer life with Alice; and her object-obsessed poetry. She reflects on what these objects meant to Gertrude and Alice and how they built a life with them. And she considers what our own domestic objects mean to us – in this time of over-consumption when the notion of ‘home’ is so precarious.

Contributors
Liesl Olson, author of Modernism and the Ordinary (Oxford, 2009) and Director of the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum at the University of Illinois Chicago.
Hannah Roche, Lecturer in Twentieth-Century Literature and Culture at the University of York.

Producer
Mohini Patel