'You bad dog'

An early work that put Gertrude Stein on the literary map

Jun 05, 2026

from Gertrude Stein, Three Lives (1909)

Anna led an arduous and troubled life.

Anna managed the whole little house for Miss Mathilda. It was a funny little house, one of a whole row of all the same kind that made a close pile like a row of dominoes that a child knocks over, for they were built along a street which at this point came down a steep hill. They were funny little houses, two stories high, with red brick fronts and long white steps.

This one little house was always very full with Miss Mathilda, an under servant, stray dogs and cats and Anna’s voice that scolded, managed, grumbled all day long.

“Sallie! can’t I leave you alone a minute but you must run to the door to see the butcher boy come down the street and there is Miss Mathilda calling for her shoes. Can I do everything while you go around always thinking about nothing at all? If I ain’t after you every minute you would be forgetting all, the time, and I take all this pains, and when you come to me you was as ragged as a buzzard and as dirty as a dog. Go and find Miss Mathilda her shoes where you put them this morning.”

“Peter!”,—her voice rose higher,—“Peter!”,—Peter was the youngest and the favorite dog,—“Peter, if you don’t leave Baby alone,”—Baby was an old, blind terrier that Anna had loved for many years,—“Peter if you don’t leave Baby alone, I take a rawhide to you, you bad dog.”

The good Anna had high ideals for canine chastity and discipline. The three regular dogs, the three that always lived with Anna, Peter and old Baby, and the fluffy little Rags, who was always jumping up into the air just to show that he was happy, together with the transients, the many stray ones that Anna always kept until she found them homes, were all under strict orders never to be bad one with the other.

A sad disgrace did once happen in the family. A little transient terrier for whom Anna had found a home suddenly produced a crop of pups. The new owners were certain that this Foxy had known no dog since she was in their care. The good Anna held to it stoutly that her Peter and her Rags were guiltless, and she made her statement with so much heat that Foxy’s owners were at last convinced that these results were due to their neglect.

“You bad dog,” Anna said to Peter that night, “you bad dog.”

“Peter was the father of those pups,” the good Anna explained to Miss Mathilda, “and they look just like him too, and poor little Foxy, they were so big that she could hardly have them, but Miss Mathilda, I would never let those people know that Peter was so bad.”

Periods of evil thinking came very regularly to Peter and to Rags and to the visitors within their gates. At such times Anna would be very busy and scold hard, and then too she always took great care to seclude the bad dogs from each other whenever she had to leave the house. Sometimes just to see how good it was that she had made them, Anna would leave the room a little while and leave them all together, and then she would suddenly come back. Back would slink all the wicked-minded dogs at the sound of her hand upon the knob, and then they would sit desolate in their corners like a lot of disappointed children whose stolen sugar has been taken from them.

Innocent blind old Baby was the only one who preserved the dignity becoming in a dog.

You see that Anna led an arduous and troubled life.

**Paul Cézanne, ‘Madame Cézanne with a Fan’ (1878/88), Emil Bührle Collection. Stein owned this painting and wrote** **Three Lives** **while sitting beneath it at her desk. Notice that one of Madame’s eyes is entirely black; Picasso later copied this curious touch for one of his own paintings, in tribute to Cezanne.**

What we love about this passage…

Stein creates a vibrant sense of domestic life, and her clear, straightforward prose may surprise you if you’re used to her more opaque and difficult writing. We love the focus on the servant and the dogs rather than the owner of the house; Anna is clearly the centre of this home and Miss Mathilda almost superfluous, in Stein’s telling. The behaviour of the dogs is also keenly observed, especially as Stein attributes ideas to them such as ‘evil thinking’ and disappointment. This subtle shift of emphasis and perspective shows Stein experimenting with narrative fiction, much as Virginia Woolf would do in her own highly innovative novels and stories. Woolf and Stein are also connected by their mutual interest in dogs as literary subjects: Woolf wrote a biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s dog, called Flush, in 1933.

About the Author

Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) was an American poet, playwright, novelist, editor, and essayist whose enigmatic, often impenetrable texts are some of the key writings of Modernism, genuinely ‘making it new,’ as her fellow countryman Ezra Pound exhorted writers to do. Sherwood Anderson wrote in his preface to Stein’s Geography and Plays that Three Lives, his first encounter with Stein’s work, ‘contained some of the best writing ever done by an American.’ One of her best-known lines is ‘Rose is a rose is a rose’… which appears in her story ‘Sacred Emily’.

Stein shared her life with Alice B. Toklas, her lover, companion, assistant, editor, critic, and domestic organizer for almost four decades, until Stein’s death. They met the day after Toklas arrived in Paris in 1907, having left San Francisco after the devastating earthquake there. In 1933, Stein published a memoir of their lives together entitled The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.

To read alongside…

To continue our celebration of the start of Pride month, why not try James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room? Like Stein, Baldwin experiments radically with what narrative prose can do, and the novel’s geographic centre is Paris, also loved by Stein.

Marcel Proust was another LGBTQ+ writer of the period whose works challenged the conventions of writing a life, particularly in his complex depictions of Françoise, the narrator’s housekeeper in the novel. Proust drew on his own relationship with Céleste Albaret: his housekeeper, secretary, trusted confidante, and nurse during the final years in which he was completing In Search of Lost Time.

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