If she’s ever neglected as a writer and doyenne of the American expatriates in Paris, Gertrude Stein will always be remembered for her epigrams. She’s the person to whom Ernest Hemingway attributed the phrase, “You are all a lost generation,” in the epigraph to his classic novel The Sun Also Rises (1926), thus naming one of America’s most famous literary cohorts (though apparently the actual coiner was really a garage owner in the Paris suburbs). Stein also famously described Oakland, the town in which she was raised, saying, “There is no there there.” This is pure Stein: a deformation of conventional English syntax and rhythm, with a stunning use of repetition, that somehow expresses briefly what it would be difficult to express any better at length. The inventive syntactic and stylistic experiments of American modernism—think Hemingway and John Dos Passos—would be impossible to imagine without Stein’s influence.

Composed in 1903 at the very beginning of her career, the novella Q.E.D. is much less self-consciously experimental, much less linguistically startling, than the work Stein began to publish in 1909. Even as she churned out dozens of impenetrable books, this earlier piece went unpublished during her lifetime: a limited edition was printed in 1950, and the first widely available one only in 1971. (Now it is available in various editions of Stein’s early writing.) Why the delay? The explanation, of course, is that Q.E.D. takes up in relatively explicit terms—about as explicit as Stein would ever be, on any subject—the subject of lesbian desire, as well as the relationship of Jews to other Americans. Stein describes each of the novel’s three characters as bearing “the stamp of one of the older civilisations”: Helen the English, Mabel the Italian. And Adele, the protagonist? Stein only hints that she’s Jewish. “I have the failing of my tribe,” Adele remarks, referring to her tendency to talk and talk and talk and talk; a page later, annoyed with the other two, she exclaims, “I always did thank God I wasn’t born a woman,” echoing one of the Birkot Ha’Shakhar (morning blessings) recited by Orthodox Jews at the start of each day, and also signaling the complexities of gender at work here.

The plot tracks these three young American women in Europe, Baltimore, and New York, as well as Adele’s dawning consciousness of the mutual attraction between herself and Helen. “Why … it’s like a bit of mathematics,” she notes, of her realization of the feelings between them­, “Suddenly it does itself and you begin to see”—which also explains why the story’s title refers to the Latin formula quod erat demonstrandum,usually used to announce the solution of a mathematical proof. A triangular situation develops, in which Adele envies Mabel’s patronage of Helen (“Oh it’s simply prostitution,” she whines, as Mabel buys Helen’s affection with antique jewelry); but Adele is also confused about what she wants. Though easier to read, in a way, than Stein’s incredible “Melanctha,” (itself said to be a revised version of Q.E.D. set among African-Americans rather than lesbians), the early novel is elliptical and strange—but what else can we expect at a time when the issues at hand could barely be treated in private conversation, let alone prose?