In 1924 Ernest Hemingway published Dorothy Richardson's ‘The Garden’ in Transatlantic Review. In this short story she draws on material associated with her own earliest bee-memory, to dramatize the event of a small child first discovering herself through her relation with the natural world. It is a story about the beginnings of consciousness. A later autobiographical sketch underlines its resonance for Richardson: ‘Berkshire was also a vast garden, flowers, bees and sunlight, a three-in-one, at once enchantment and a benevolent conspiracy of awareness turned towards a small being to whom they first, and they alone, brought the sense of existing’ (B. 110–11). There is an air of mysticism about this Edenic founding of selfhood in a Berkshire garden, where the child moves in a magical sphere presided over by a natural and sentient trinity of flowers, bees, and sunlight. It is a scene that connotes innocence, security, and, above all, home, for Richardson, the lost garden of her Babington childhood. And it surfaces, reinscribed in fragments and allusions, within the narrative of Miriam Henderson, as the moment ‘when the strange independent joy had begun’ (i. 316). As such, it is presented as a founding event, and one that deserves our attention – a place from which to begin to trace the anatomy of memory at work in Pilgrimage in more detail.

‘The Garden’ is the fullest narrativization of the scene that serves in Richardson's work, then, as a form of ur-memory. Like the first pages of Joyce's Portrait, though without the controlling parental free indirect discourse, it leads the reader directly into a child's consciousness. This child's thought with its precise, syntactical flow and repetition, has an almost Steinian simplicity. As she ventures down the gravel path, the child attempts to measure herself in and through the world of sensations that surrounds her.