Alice B. Toklas never embraced- nor to be frank, admitted being Jewish. She fancifully imagined herself baptized by any leaking Catholic, and fervently believed in an afterlife. Always the more practical of the two, Toklas expected that Gertrude Stein, who had not been baptized, would need to be bailed out of Limbo.  This is something that could only be done by paying the Church for intercession, prayers for her soul, candles lit to burn up Gertrude's minor (subliterary) sins. If Gertrude's will had been clearer, Janet Malcolm believes that Toklas would have liquidated all of the famous Modernist paintings that Toklas was given a living from and they would now be in the Vatican Museum.  In Malcolm's Two Lives, we get the lovely story of May Bookbinder (a young woman for whom  Gertrude had conceived a great passion) whose love letters Alice discovered. It is generally accepted now that Toklas had demanded Gertrude remove every instance of the word 'may" in a piece she was writing, replacing it with "can". Though slavish, and particularly jealous, Toklas never admitted that she and Stein were lesbians. What might have constituted sex between the two of them might possibly not be generally recognized. It's impossible to know even when you are told, as Gore Vidal does, who does what to whom. Malcolm suggests that a passage of Stein's writing clearly signals her sexual attraction to women, Alice particularly, which, though I've read it over and over- something about old clocks and bright handkerchiefs, and food and dirty things- and all it does is confirm my belief that I know nothing about the sexual organs of females.
Malcolm, though able to be succinct and meandering simultaneously, has such a clean, refreshing style, that it makes me doubly reluctant to return to Cynthia Ozick's 'Fame and Folly'. Cynthia's sentences are occasionally overwrought, alliterative and provoking. There is a repugnant piece on her own precocity, as reflected in the envy of her classmate, the subluminary Alfred Chester. It is called Alfred Chester's Wig and she compares their brilliant wordsmithing and she compares his hairlessness to her own broad nose and we see her adolescent desires which must have appalled Chester whose homosexuality she sees as spurious.
It has made me realize that though I preferred dead writers, I had conferred a sort of honorary posthumousness on living female authors who were, well... like Welty and Pym and Ozick. I could read them pleasurably without worrying that they were worrying about their own desirability. I would hate to admit that ugliness confers some degree of integrity. I suppose it makes any renown seem to be hard-earned. Of course initially any peculiarity generates curiosity. Odd names stick in your mind. But you can also ask: would a tall Lautrec have the same reputation? What if Emily Dickinson had been the kind of gal that said "Have you heard this one?" and slapped your back when she guffawed. What if Sartre could see what was in front of him? I don't know if this is worthy of exploration. I think it is generally agreed that isolation might breed the talent to promote one's gifts. Let's say that it was Ozick's good fortune to look like Irvin S. Cobb with a mop on his head. Maybe this made her need to prove some sort of exceptional intelligence. So she spars with Chester, and flaunts her Eliot.  She constantly reminds us, she is nothing if not ardent about her enthusiasms. Her diligence in championing Eliot despite his anti-semitism is only partially to accrue some admiration from decoding Eliot's obscure lists of academic references. 
My experiences with Ozick have never come to equal my first happy chance reading of Levitation, which was in a Pushcart collection, I think. One of the things I found in the UALR library. I didn't understand it but I liked it enormously and began collecting her. Now, for the first time I wonder if I should Ebay all the many volumes of hers which stick together in back rows in cabinets. Ozick. Cheever, and Updike and Colette and Maugham and Brookner- books I once valued so highly and that I will never again be able to commit a moment to; I cannot entirely give them up, but then I don't run into them all that often.
In the humidity of Arkansas books didn't last long...but I still have most of the books I have always had. Their decay will likely be slower than the deliquescence of my ability to read them.