Three Lives
HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics.‘Melanctha Herbert was always seeking rest and quiet, and always she could only find new ways to be in trouble.’In Bridgepoint, USA, people get trapped into lives they didn’t choose, without means of escape: Anna, a sweet but intimidating German housemaid; Melanctha, a troubled young woman whose passion threatens to tear her apart; and Lena, a timid girl bullied into work and marriage. In this ground-breaking collection, Stein depicts the interior lives of these women, struggling to find happiness in an unkind world.Gertrude Stein was a pioneering figurehead of Modernism, and a mentor to writers like Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Written in 1909, Three Lives captures the artistic styles of Picasso, Cézanne and Matisse, and uses them to create heart-breaking portraits of working-class women.
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THREE LIVES
Gertrude Stein
William Collins
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This eBook edition published by William Collins in 2017
Life & Times section © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
Silvia Crompton asserts her moral right as author of the Life & Times section
Classic Literature: Words and Phrases adapted from
Collins English Dictionary
Cover by e-Digital Design
Cover illustration: Three girls in yellow straw hats, 1913, Macke, August (1887-1914) / Haags Gemeentemuseum, The Hague, Netherlands / Bridgeman Images
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the authorâs imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780008242114
Ebook Edition © June 2017 ISBN: 9780008242121
Version: 2017-05-30
In 1819, millworker William Collins from Glasgow, Scotland, set up a company for printing and publishing pamphlets, sermons, hymn books, and prayer books. That company was Collins and was to mark the birth of HarperCollins Publishers as we know it today. The long tradition of Collins dictionary publishing can be traced back to the ï¬rst dictionary William co-published in 1825, Greek and English Lexicon. Indeed, from 1840 onwards, he began to produce illustrated dictionaries and even obtained a licence to print and publish the Bible.
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About the Author
âI know that I am the most important writer writing today,â Gertrude Stein declared in a 1937 memoir, a statement that, even at the time, would have sparked lively debate. During the early decades of the twentieth century, she had produced novels, poems and plays, much of her work being written in an iconic experimental style that her admirers considered daring, her critics nonsensical. But there is little doubt that Stein was one of the most important artistic figures of her day. As a writer, she challenged the established boundaries of the English language; as an art collector, she amassed and exhibited an extraordinary hoard of era-defining paintings; and as an unapologetically gay woman, she lived her life in the public eye with an openness that would still be remarkable today.
