Proust's In Search of Lost Time

In November 1913 the Paris publisher Bernard Grasset brought out Du cote de chez Swann (Swann's Way), the first volume of Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu, known in English as In Search of Lost Time. The whole work runs to seven volumes and well over a million words, making it one of the longest novels ever written. Proust paid for the first volume himself after several publishers, including the Nouvelle Revue Francaise, turned it down.¹

Proust was a wealthy Parisian who spent his later years largely in a cork-lined bedroom, writing at night. His narrator recalls his childhood in the village of Combray, the love affair of the society figure Charles Swann with Odette, and the aristocratic salons of the Belle Epoque. The famous turning point comes when the taste of a madeleine dipped in tea suddenly brings back a whole lost world, the book's central example of involuntary memory. Real events such as the Dreyfus Affair divide the characters and show how social worlds change.¹

The book's argument is that time is lost through habit and forgetting, and regained through memory and art. Proust died in November 1922 while still revising the later volumes, which appeared up to 1927. The first volume was a modest success, but critics soon recognized it, and the second volume won the Prix Goncourt in 1919. Its long, rolling sentences and psychological depth influenced Virginia Woolf, Vladimir Nabokov and countless later novelists, and its title and the madeleine have become everyday cultural shorthand for nostalgia.¹