Gertrude Stein

Gertrude Stein was born to shine within the collective, and shine there she did: her Aquarius Sun is the ego that comes alive not on a solo throne but among the tribe, the salon, the network of brilliant minds. From 1903 she made Paris her home, and her drawing room drew the whole avant-garde of the age, Picasso and Matisse, Hemingway and Fitzgerald, Pound and Anderson, gathering under her roof. That Sun in the twelfth house, the hidden and unknowable place, suits a writer who worked in fog and mirage, dissolving ordinary sense into "Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose" and "there is no there there."

Her Pisces Ascendant wore the dreamy, mystic mask, the chameleon who looks different in every photograph. Beneath it her Virgo Moon, meticulous and craftsmanlike, gave her the discipline to labour over experimental prose; placed in the seventh house, it bound her emotional life to partnership, above all to Alice B. Toklas, in whose voice she wrote her 1933 bestseller.