Romance language.

Baby Precious Always Shines: Selected Love Notes Between Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas 

The more than 40-year love affair between arch-modernist Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas is legendary in the annals of lesbian history, but given the difficulty of Stein's prose, the sexual conservatism of her times, and the sheer volume of her literary output (she wrote every day of her adult life), written proof has been hard to come by. Certainly lesbians have trawled through "Lifting Belly," a poem saturated with sensuality, and the more adventurous have discovered dyke domesticity in "A Lyrical Opera Made by Two." Now we have more. Editor Kay Turner has unearthed a treasury of ephemera: the love notes, only recently catalogued, that mostly Stein and occasionally Toklas wrote to each other at the end of the day. Erotic without being explicit, affectionate but not schmaltzy, these notes are a testament to a physical, enduring love. What better way to start the new century than with a record of one of the great lesbian couples of the previous one.