Three Lives: Stories of the Good Anna, Melanctha, and the Gentle Lena - Couverture souple

Three Lives (1909) was American writer Gertrude Stein's first published book. The book is separated into three stories, "The Good Anna", "Melanctha", and "The Gentle Lena". The three stories are independent of each other, but all are set in Bridgepoint, a fictional town based on Baltimore. "The Good Anna": "The Good Anna", the first of Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives, is a novella set in "Bridgepoint" about Anna Federner, a servant of "solid lower middle-class south german stock". "Melanctha": "Melanctha", the longest of the Three Lives stories, is an unconventional novella that focuses upon the distinctions and blending of race, sex, gender, and female health. Stein uses a unique form of repetition to portray characters in a new way. "Melanctha", as Mark Schorer on Gale's Contemporary Authors Online depicts it, "attempts to trace the curve of a passion, its rise, its climax, its collapse, with all the shifts and modulations between dissension and reconciliation along the way". But "Melanctha" is more than one woman’s bitter experience with love; it is the representation of the internal struggles and emotional battles in finding meaning and acceptance in a tumultuous world. "The Gentle Lena": "The Gentle Lena", the third of Stein's Three Lives, follows the life and death of the titular Lena, a German girl brought to Bridgepoint by a cousin. Lena begins her life in America as a servant girl, but is eventually married to Herman Kreder, the son of German immigrants. Both Herman and Lena are marked by extraordinary passivity, and the marriage is essentially made in deference to the desires of their elders. During her married life, Lena bears Herman three children, all the while growing increasingly passive and distant. Neither Lena nor the baby survives her fourth pregnancy, leaving Herman "very well content now...with his three good, gentle children".

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