Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Marcel Proust
-
Standard Name: Proust, Marcel
French novelist, whose novel sequence A la recherche du temps perdu, published between 1913 and 1927, blends memory, invention, and psychological study of the human response to time passing. It has been almost immeasurably influential.
Speedie, Julie. Wonderful Sphinx: The Biography of Ada Leverson. Virago.
239-40
Family and Intimate relationships
Anne Stevenson
She found motherhood a struggle. She tried to keep up her serious reading (James
, Hardy
, Proust
) while breast-feeding, and to serve an elegant candlelit supper each evening while the baby cried...
Fictionalization
Germaine de Staël
Benjamin Constant
, formerly the lover of GS
, represented her in his novel Adolphe as a woman whose mind was the most wide-ranging of any woman ever, and perhaps of any man,
Kobak, Annette. “Mme de Staël and Fanny Burney”. The Burney Journal, Vol.
4
, pp. 12-35.
26
and...
Friends, Associates
Violet Trefusis
The Princesse
hosted a salon at 57 Avenue Henri-Martin attended by Anna de Noailles
, Cocteau
, Paul Valéry
, and Proust
, who incorporated some of his perceptions of the gatherings into A la...
Friends, Associates
Vernon Lee
Back in Italy after the end of the First World War, VL
continued to read widely. She returned to Dante
, Shakespeare
, and Goethe
. She introduced herself to newer writings on philosophy, science...
Intertextuality and Influence
Iris Murdoch
Her omnivorous reading during the last year of her degree included the major modern novelists, notably including Proust
and Woolf
(the darling dangerous woman who made her feel quite incapable of writing anything straight...
Intertextuality and Influence
Anita Brookner
Again the protagonist, Kitty Maule, has a mixed national heritage: French/Russian and English. Again she is emotionally impoverished though academically successful; again she falls in love with a charismatic and unattainable man, Maurice Bishop. His...
Intertextuality and Influence
Anita Brookner
The daughter has found a notebook after her mother's death, but it contains very little information. Her opening sentence fully reveals the inadequacy of her knowledge. My mother read a lot, sighed a lot, and...
Intertextuality and Influence
Pamela Hansford Johnson
The novelist-narrator, Christine Jackson (whom PHJ
says she based on herself), looks back from the present day on her young life in Clapham in the 1920s. Her work as a shorthand-typist, her aspirations to be...
Intertextuality and Influence
Pamela Hansford Johnson
Each takes as its central character a personage from Proust
, and for each PHJinvents a fresh yet perfectly harmonious setting for the scene: thus Mme Verdurin is shown entertaining the Germans in 1941...
Intertextuality and Influence
Anita Desai
AD
's work weaves together a wide range of cultural and literary references: the Mahabharata and the Bhagavadgîtâ, as well as such European authors as E. M. Forster
, T. S. Eliot
, Dickinson
Literary responses
Christina Stead
In 1963 Eldon Branda
produced a dramatised version which Stead liked, but which was not produced.
Rowley, Hazel. Christina Stead: A Biography. Secker and Warburg.
Marcel Proust
, in the final stages of writing Sodome et Gomorrhe, read Pensées d'une Amazone and initiated correspondence with NCB
, hoping to learn more about lesbianism. Telling her that her book was...
Literary responses
Gertrude Stein
GS
was disappointed at the small enthusiasm the book generated when it was published. Only Marianne Moore
reviewed it favourably. Katherine Anne Porter
despaired of its length and density, but argued that to shorten it...
Timeline
1928: Edwin Muir published The Structure of the...
1946: Critic Erich Auerbach published, in German,...
Writing climate item
1946
Critic Erich Auerbach
published, in German, the influential study which became in its English translation, 1953, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. He wrote it at Istanbul, as a Jewish refugee...
By July 1955: Françoise Sagan, aged eighteen, repeated...
Writing climate item
By July 1955
Françoise Sagan
, aged eighteen, repeated in England the previous year's sensational success in France of her novelBonjour Tristesse: the English version was by Irene Ash
.
Texts
Proust, Marcel. À L’Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs. Gallimard, 1919.
Proust, Marcel. Albertine Disparue. Éditions de la Nouvelle Revue Française, 1925.
Proust, Marcel. By Way of Sainte-Beuve. Translator Warner, Sylvia Townsend, Chatto and Windus, 1958.
Proust, Marcel. Du Côté de Chez Swann. 1913.
Proust, Marcel. La Prisonnière. Éditions de la Nouvelle Revue Française, 1923.
Proust, Marcel. Le Côté de Guermantes. Gallimard, 1920.
Proust, Marcel. Le Côté de Guermantes II (Sodome et Gomorrhe I). Éditions de la Nouvelle Revue Française, 1921.
Proust, Marcel. Le Temps Retrouvé. Éditions de la Nouvelle Revue Française, 1927.
Proust, Marcel. Les Plaisirs et les Jours. 1896.
Proust, Marcel. Sodome et Gomorrhe. Éditions de la Nouvelle Revue Française, 1922.