Three Lives, with ALS to front pastedown.
Stein’s First Book
with an Autograph Letter Signed
Stein, Gertrude. Three Lives. Stories of the Good Anna, Melanctha, and the Gentle Lena. New York: Grafton Press, 1909.
8vo.; 1947 ownership signature on front pastedown; dark blue cloth; stamped in gilt. In a specially made cloth slipcase.
Together with:
Stein, Gertrude. Autograph letter signed, to “My dear Ellen,” Paris, France, (January 8, 1925); one 5 x 8” leaf of Stein’s Paris letterhead, 27 Rue de Fleurus.
First edition of Stein’s first book, psychological portraits of three staunch women (two German-American servants, and a black woman, Melanctha): “Stories of the Good Anna,” “Melanctha,” and “The Gentle Lena”; 1000 copies, 300 of which, with a cancel title page, constituted the first English edition; issued without a dust-jacket. Wilson A1a. Together with an autograph letter to a friend affixed to the pastedown, regarding an upcoming visit to Paris and proposed lunch arrangements; in full:
My dear Ellen,
We will be pleased to see you indeed we will, we have been wondering why you didn’t [ ] through Paris as Emily said you would and now perhaps you will. Well anyway will you lunch with us Sunday at 12:30—but you will, Always, Gertrude.
Another hand—presumably Ellen’s—has penciled in what we assume to be the date of receipt, “8 Jan. 1925” at the top of the page.
This series of feminist novellas has an interesting history; Stein herself saw it as the first step in her surrealist marathon:
During the summer of 1904 with Leo Stein in Fiesole, she saw the Charles Losier collection of Cézannes in Florence and began purchasing paintings. “Everything I have done has been influenced by Flaubert and Cézanne,” Stein said in an interview with Robert Haas in 1946 (she translated some Flaubert stories in 1909); “this gave me a new feeling about composition. Up to that time composition had consisted of a central idea, to which everything else was an accompaniment and separate but was not an end in itself, and Cézanne conceived the idea that in composition one thing was as important as another thing. Each part is as important as the whole, and that impressed me enormously, ... so much that I began to write Three Lives under this influence.” Stein considered the highly acclaimed “Melanctha” (the second part of Three Lives), which recounts the story of a Negro woman, the “quintessence” of “this idea of composition.” (CDALB: The Twenties, 1917-1929. Gale Research, 1989. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/BioRC)
The second story, “Melanctha,” is now the best known of the three, often cited for its race and gender politics:
“Melanctha,” … commentators note, is essentially a reworking of the love story in Q.E.D., this time presenting it as a heterosexual affair between two black characters [though one is, importantly, Mulatto]. Although critics now recognize “Melanctha” as an inaccurate, stereotyped depiction of black American life, it was virtually unprecedented as a serious attempt by a white author to portray realistic black characters. Both Q.E.D. and Three Lives, although relatively conventional, contain some traces of Stein’s later, experimental style, such as minimal punctuation, lack of emphasis on plot, and the depiction of characters as psychological types rather than as unique individuals.
Despite the inclusion of this “minor masterpiece,” it took Stein three years to get the collection published. She voiced her concerns early on in a letter to a friend: “I am afraid that I can never write the great American novel. I don’t know how to sell on a margin or do anything with shorts or longs, so I have to content myself with niggers and servant girls and the foreign population generally… [The stories are] very simple and very vulgar and I don’t think they will interest the great American public…” (Charmed Circle, by James Mellow, NY: Praeger, 1974, p. 77). She was much more optimist
Print Inquire