“I don’t think there ever has been in the whole of literature such an example of the power of analysis, and I feel safe in saying that there will never be another.”—Joseph Conrad.
The world of fashion in which Marcel Proust spent his youth and early manhood saw nothing of him during the last thirteen years of his life. A victim of chronic illness, he barricaded himself in his apartment, swathed himself like an Egyptian mummy, drew his shutters and curtains to exclude the light, and there recorded his chronicle of things past. Son of a distinguished physician and an heiress of a rich Jewish family, Proust had his first training under the guidance of the Roman Catholic Church. An association in the 1890’s with some of the aesthetes of that period resulted in the publication of a review, to which Proust contributed some juvenile prose and verse. Thereafter the fashionable Faubourg St. Germain became his sphere, and it was there, among the illustrious and well-born, that he assimilated those fragments of gossip and family history which were later transmuted into a world in itself—the world of À La Recherche du Temps Perdu.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
LES PLAISIRS ET LES JOURS (with a preface by Anatole France (1896))
DU CÔTÉ DE CHEZ SWANN (1918) (SWANN’S WAY (1923))
À L’OMBRE DES JEUNES FILLES EN FLEURS (1918) (WITHIN A BUDDING GROVE (1924))
LE CÔTÉ DE GUERMANTES I (1920) LE CÔTÉ DE GUERMANTES II (1921) (THE GUERMANTES WAY (1925))
SODOME ET GOMORRHE I (1921) SODOME ET GOMORRHE II (1922) (CITIES OF THE PLAIN (1928))
LA PRISONNIÈRE (1923) (THE CAPTIVE (1929))
ALBERTINE DISPARUE (1926) (THE SWEET CHEAT GONE (1930))