SOURCE: “Three Lives: The Realism of the Composition,” in The Making of a Modernist: Gertrude Stein from “Three Lives” to “Tender Buttons,” The University of Massachusetts Press, 1984, pp. 19–41.

In the following essay, Walker explores the role of modernist painting in Stein's composition of Three Lives.

In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas Stein recalled that she wrote Three Lives while “looking and looking” at Cézanne's Portrait of Mme Cézanne (ABT, 34). Before she began these stories in 1905, she had written three narratives: Q.E.D., a semiautobiographical account of a lesbian triangle; Fernhurst; and five chapters of a family chronicle, which later served as the beginning of The Making of Americans. Compared to Three Lives and the texts that followed, these are conventional narratives, except for the theme of lesbianism that appears in Q.E.D. Three Lives, and especially the story “Melanctha,” which recasts Q.E...