Three Lives

Written by Gertrude Stein

Narrated by Laurel Lefkow and Trei Taylor

Gertrude Stein’s pioneering triptych Three Lives portrays the lives of three working-class women in the fictional American town of Bridgepoint (Baltimore). A progenitor of the ‘stream of consciousness’ technique later adopted by Joyce and Woolf, Stein takes us into the minds of three distinct women, who are each trapped in their societal positions. ‘The Good Anna’ follows a stern but kind German immigrant, ‘Melanctha’ the tragic life of an African-American woman of the same name, and ‘The Gentle Lena’ a dreamy and unopinionated servant whose passiveness becomes her undoing. The non-linear narratives, with their syntactical repetition and de-emphasis on plot, were unique for their time and owed much to the author’s friendships with the artists Cézanne, Picasso and Matisse.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Naxos Audiobooks
• Release date: Mar 30, 2018
• ISBN: 9781781984000

Gertrude Stein

Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) was an American novelist and poet. Born in Pennsylvania, in 1903 she immigrated to France, where she would live for the rest of her life. The home on the Left Bank of Paris that she shared with her partner, Alice B. Toklas, became a cultural hub as young artists and writers began to gather there. As her salon rose to prominence, Stein befriended several expatriate authors living in Paris, including Djuna Barnes, James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway. Stein has been credited with coining the term the lost generation to describe this group of writers. She died in France in 1946. 

Reviews for Three Lives

[Anne S. · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The Good Anna [3/5]
Melanctha [DNF, will read at some point]
The Gentle Lena [4/5 - well, that was depressing...]