A Study Guide for Julia Glass's "Three Junes"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Julia Glass's "Three Junes," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Jun 27, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535841016

Book preview

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Three Junes

Julia Glass

2002

Introduction

Three Junes, published in 2002 to critical acclaim, was Julia Glass's debut novel. A triptych, or work of art in three parts, Three Junes unfolds over three different summers, during the years 1989, 1995, and 1999. Set in Greece, Scotland, Greenwich Village, and Long Island, the novel tells the intersecting stories of Scottish widower Paul McLeod, his son Fenno, who owns a bookstore in Manhattan, and a young widowed artist, Fern Olitsky. Thematically, the novel has universal appeal in its portrayal of grief, fate, hope, and family connection. It earned Glass a National Book Award.

After Three Junes, Glass published The Whole World Over in 2006, a novel that featured several characters from Three Junes. A recurring theme in her novels, beginning with Three Junes is memory, particularly the ways in which people struggle to heal emotional scars from the past that prevent them from fully living in the present. As the three protagonists of Three Junes learn how to experience intimacy after the death of a loved one, Glass shows the truth in the old adage that time heals all wounds.

Author Biography

Julia Glass was born in 1956. She did not pursue a writing career until completing her education at Yale University, where she graduated with a degree in art. After Yale, she earned a fellowship to study figurative painting in Paris, but upon returning to the United States and settling in New York City, she took a job as a copy editor at Cosmopolitan magazine. During that time, she began to pen occasional magazine columns and short stories. One of her earliest short stories, never published, anticipates Paul's conflict in Three Junes. A semiautobiographical piece called Souvenirs, the story was inspired by a student trip she took to Greece and someone she had met: an older man, recently widowed.

In the early 1990s, Glass suffered several personal tragedies; her marriage ended in divorce, she was diagnosed with breast cancer, and her younger sister committed suicide. Glass used writing to work through her pain and turned back to the story of the widower she had met in Greece. She expanded the short story to novella length, changed the point of view, and renamed the piece, Collies. The short story won the Pirate's Alley Faulkner Society Medal in 1999 and served as the cornerstone for Three Junes. In 2000, Glass became a New York Foundation for the Arts fellow.

From 2004 to 2005, Glass served as a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Her second