Feuille d'Album (short story)

Feuille d'Album is a 1917 short story by Katherine Mansfield. It was first published in the New Age on 20 September 1917, under the title of An Album Leaf.[1] A revised version later appeared in Bliss and Other Stories.[2]

Plot summary

Ian French, a guy who lived alone in Paris. He is shy and rarely talks to anyone and as a matter of fact he blushes deeply around girls. However, he did not like anyone, though women tried to help him. One tried to let him fall in love, the other wanted him to love life so she made him drink in late-night expensive clubs, also she took him to places that there was shooting the day before. And the last one just wanted to take care of him, she checked him daily and made sure he was getting everything he needs. Although he rejected all of them. One day he was resting in a coffee shop that he regularly goes to. He saw a girl, she wasn't a regular lady for him, he imagined that the girl was the same age as him. He wanted to talk to her so while she was shopping in the market in Paris, he followed her. In the end, he wanted to give up and not talk to her, but then he had an idea. He found her buying some eggs so he pretended that she dropped an egg so he gave her another one.

Characters in Feuille d'Album
  • Ian French, a painter; likes to sit in cafés in Paris. He lives in a studio.
  • his neighbour, a girl of his age, who goes out shopping on Thursdays.

Major themes
  • Sleeping
  • Eating
  • Drama
  • loving
  • Wearing
  • Cooking

Literary significance

The text is written in the modernist mode, without a set structure, and with many shifts in the narrative.

Footnotes
  1. The New Age. Volume 21, Number 21. Retrieved on July 28, 2016.
  2. Katherine Mansfield, Selected Stories, Oxford World's Classics, explanatory notes


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