10 July 1871: Marcel Proust is born

Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust, born on this day in 1871, was a French novelist, critic, and essayist who wrote the monumental novel In Search of Lost Time (also known as Remembrance of Things Past). He is considered by critics and writers to be one of the most influential authors of the 20th century. His writing abandoned plot and dramatic action in favor of the narrator’s descriptions of his experiences in the world.

Marcel Proust was born in the Paris borough of Auteuil to Adrien Achille Proust, a prominent French pathologist and epidemiologist, and Jeanne Clémence (Weil), the daughter of a wealthy Jewish family from Alsace. Literate and well-read, Proust’s mother had a high command of the English language and would later help her son’s translations of John Ruskin. Raised in his father’s Catholic faith, Proust never formally adopted it and later became an atheist.

A sickly child, who suffered severe asthma, Proust spent long holidays in the village of Illiers, which, together with aspects of his great-Uncle’s house in Auteuil, became the model for the fictional town of “Combray,” where some of the most important scenes of In Search of Lost Time take place (Illiers was renamed Illiers-Combray on the occasion of the Proust centenary celebrations in 1971).

As a young man, Proust was a social climber, whose aspirations as a writer were hampered by his lack of application to work, and, despite his poor health, he did serve a year as an enlisted man in the French army. His reputation from this period was that of a snob and an aesthete, which contributed to his later troubles getting his work published. He never had a job, and he didn’t move from his parents’ apartment until after both were dead. Although he never openly admitted it, Proust is known to have been homosexual, and his sexuality and relationships with men are often discussed by his biographers.

His life changed considerably in the early twentieth century. His father died in September 1903, and his beloved mother died in September 1905, leaving him grief-stricken, but with a considerable inheritance. His health continued to deteriorate.

Proust spent the last three years of his life largely confined to his bedroom, sleeping during the day and working at night to complete his novel. He died aged 51 in November 1922 of bronchitis and pneumonia following an asthma attack and was buried in the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris.

Proust’s In Search of Lost Time is one of those novels that everyone has heard of and intended to read, but which people rarely get around to actually reading. A few years ago I finally managed to read it all. It is certainly not a light or easy read, but it really does repay the effort you put in. I was so happy to have read it, and felt hugely enriched by the experience. Proust takes you on so many journeys into the world of music, art, French society, history and travel, and his characters (many of whom are based on real people) are memorable.