"Three Lives" by Gertrude Stein

Three short stories/ novellas by the famous American ex-pat novelist who also write Blood on the Dining-Room Floor.

Despite Stein's privileged upbringing, the stories focus on ordinary folk. The Good Anna and The Gentle Lena are both servants, Melanctha is a girl of mixed heritage who "liked to wander" rather more than is good for her. Trigger warning: some of the characters conform to racial stereotypes. 

The prose style is not nearly so difficult as in Blood on the Dining-Room Floor. However it does contain some very rambling paragraphs which use recursiveness and quasi-repetitiveness to interesting effect, both in and out of dialogue:

“That certainly is the way always with you, Jeff Campbell, if I understand you right the way you are always acting to me. That certainly is right the way I am saying it to you now, Jeff Campbell. You certainly didn't anyway trust me now no more, did you, when you acted so bad to me. I certainly am right the way I say it Jeff now to you. I certainly am right when I ask you for it now, to tell me what I ask you, about not trusting me more then again, Jeff, just like you never really knew me.” (Melanctha)
“All he knew was, he was an easy now always to be with Melanctha. All he knew was that he was always uneasy when he was with Melanctha, not the way he used to be from just not being very understanding, but now, because he never could be honest with her, because he was now always feeling her strong suffering, in her, because he knew now he was having a straight, good feeling with her, but she went so fast, and he was so slow to her; Jeff knew his right feeling never got a chance to show itself as strong to her.” (Melanctha)

The Melanctha story itself loops back to the beginning and repeats itself, except the third person of Rose Johnson becomes a first person in her dialogue.

Classic stories by a writer with a distinctive (unique?) style.

Selected quotes:

• “The languor and the stir, the warmth and weight and the strong feel of life from the deep centres of the earth that comes always with the early, soaking spring, when it is not answered with an active fervent joy, gives always anger, irritation and unrest.” (The Good Anna 2)
• “The sharp bony edges and corners of her head and face were still rounded out with flesh, but already the temper and the humour showed sharply in her clean blue eyes, and the thinning was begun about the lower jaw, that was so often strained with the upward pressure of resolve.” (The Good Anna 2)
• “Her bearing was full of the strange coquetry of anger and of fear, the stiffness, the bridling, the suggestive movement underneath the rigidness of forced control, all the ways the passions have to show themselves all one.” (The Good Anna 2)
• “It was wonderful how Mrs Lehntman could listen and not hear, could answer and yet not decide, could say and do what she was asked and yet the things as they were before.” (The Good Anna 2)
• “Anna was never daring in her ways. Save and you will have the money you have saved was all that she could know.” (The Good Anna 2)
• “Friendship goes by favour. There is always danger of a break or of a stronger power coming in between.” (The Good Anna 2)
• “Melanctha had not found it easy with herself to make her wants and what she had agree.” (Melanctha)
• “In these next years Melanctha learned many ways that lead to wisdom. She learned the ways, and dimly in the distance she saw wisdom. Those years of learning led very straight to trouble for Melanctha, though in these years Melanctha never did or meant anything that was really wrong.” (Melanctha)
• “It was very early now in the Southern springtime. The trees were just beginning to get the little zigzag crinkles in them, which the young buds always give them.” (Melanctha)

November 2025; 224 pages

First published in 1909

My paperback edition was issued by Renard Press in 2022

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God