Marcel Proust (1871–1922) is best known as the author of the seven-volume masterpiece A la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time, 1913–27). He was born in Auteuil, on the west of Paris, to well-to-do parents; at the age of 10 he suffered a near-fatal asthma attack and his life from that point onward was marked by ill health. He began writing reviews, short stories, and society journalism whilst studying at the Lycée Condorcet and published a collection of these pieces, Les Plaisirs et les jours (Pleasures and Days) in 1896. Family connections and schoolfriends gave him access to the highest Parisian social circles, on which he would later draw for his portrayal of the society life in In Search of Lost Time. His first attempt at an extended narrative (posthumously published as Jean Santeuil, 1952) was abandoned; subsequent stages in his apprenticeship as a writer include translating works by the English art historian and social critic John Ruskin and producing dazzling pastiches of major French writers. Finally, during 1908–9, whilst working on a critical essay taking to task the great nineteenth-century critic Sainte-Beuve, Proust began to draft fragments of a first-person narrative that coalesced into what would become In Search of Lost Time. The first volume, containing Swann in Love, appeared in 1913. Unfit for military service, Proust spent the wartime years expanding his novel, the subsequent volumes of which appeared between 1919 and 1927. Proust’s devotion to his work, sleeping by day then writing and making additions and revisions through the night, was ruinous for his already fragile health and he died in 1922, while still engaged in the corrections to his final volumes.
Brian Nelson is Professor Emeritus (French Studies and Translation Studies) at Monash University, Melbourne, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. His publications include The Cambridge Introduction to French Literature, The Cambridge Companion to Zola, Zola and the Bourgeoisie, and translations of Zola’s Earth (with Julie Rose), The Fortune of the Rougons, The Belly of Paris, The Kill, Pot Luck, and The Ladies’ Paradise. He was awarded the New South Wales Premier’s Prize for Translation in 2015.
Adam Watt is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Exeter. He has published widely on the life and works of Marcel Proust. His books include a monograph Reading in Proust’s A la recherche: le délire de la lecture (Oxford University Press, 2009); an illustrated biography, Marcel Proust (Reaktion Books, 2013; Chinese edition, Lijian Publishing, 2015); and, as editor, Marcel Proust in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2013).