Holed up in rented rooms at 20 Bloomsbury Square near the British Museum, Stein began to record her thoughts in a notebook—descriptions of her surroundings, quotations from books she was reading, snatches of overheard conversation. Her first entry is an evocative sketch of London’s East End—its greyness, its Indian restaurants, its pubs and music halls, laundries and tea shops—that slowly brings the buildings, and their interiors, to life. Lonely and anxious, she was people-watching intently, observing the way “everybody talks to everybody,” familiarizing herself with social quirks and unspoken rules (how anyone will buy a drink for someone out of work, for example, but regular spongers will be despised). Stein applied for a six-month pass to the British Museum’s reading room, where she devised a scheme to read through English literature from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century—extending the project she had begun as a teenager in California. She spent entire days at the museum, breaking only to eat: there she read the works of Fanny Burney; Bunyan’s Life and Death of Mr. Badman; several books about Chinese history and literature; and various studies of saints, including Mary Francis Cusack’s Life and Revelations of Saint Gertrude. Among her notes from her reading, Stein tried out some titles for possible short stories, her first attempts at fiction since the Radcliffe composition classes: “Maggie being the history of a gentle soul”; “The Progress of Jane Sands being a history of one woman and many others”; “The Tragedy of the Wirkin Sisters.” And she jotted down the beginnings of a narrative based on the ill-fated marriage of her older cousin, Bird Stein, who was then in the middle of a high-profile divorce case, involving numerous lawyers and private detectives, that was titillating the New York press.
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