‘And he handed her an egg’: The Art of Memory in ‘Feuille d'Album’, Katherine Mansfield and Proust

Through a detailed analysis of Katherine Mansfield's ‘Feuille d'Album’, this essay will identify affinities between the French philosopher Henri Bergson, the writer Marcel Proust and Mansfield herself, in terms of memory and imagination, and what Proust called the ‘sense of reality’, acquired through the connection of both these faculties in the present moment. Mansfield wrote to her husband in 1922: ‘I want to be REAL’. That sense of reality is the artist's achievement in the present moment and the sense of the fullness of time thus obtained seems to belong to the realm of the impossible. A work of art nevertheless opens up the world of the possible, as suggested by the paradoxical end to ‘Feuille d'Album’, a story that can be considered as a parable of the art of writing and might therefore be placed side by side with the last act of Shakespeare's Winter's Tale, where art – and especially words, music, and rhythm – creates a figure of living memory, an instance of resurrection.