Introduction

Henri Bergson (1859–1941) and Albert Einstein (1879–1955) are names bound up with each other and inseparable from literary modernism’s twin projects of representing multiplicities of self and time. It is apposite, then, that the two men met for the first time in 1922, ‘the year that made modernism’. ¹ The philosopher and the physicist are frequently cited together. ² And, although there are distinct differences between Einstein’s and Bergson’s theories, the kinship between the two has been acknowledged by expert commentators. ³ Whilst Bergson’s philosophy of duration and Einstein’s theories of relativity effect fundamental breaks with earlier understandings of space and time, modernist experiments give voice to novel perceptions of the spatial and temporal. This book, Durée as Einstein-in-the-Heart, explores this confluence of philosophy, theoretical physics, and literary experimentation by tracing the trajectory of modernist interaction with Bergson and Einstein through selected fictional and autobiographical texts. The authors of specific interest being the key modernist, Virginia Woolf (1882–1941), and her lesser-known contemporary, Mary Butts (1890–1937).