Editing Marcel Proust (section)

==Early writing==
Proust was involved in writing and publishing from an early age. In addition to the literary magazines with which he was associated, and in which he published while at school (''La Revue verte'' and ''La Revue lilas''), from 1890 to 1891 he published a regular society column in the journal ''Le Mensuel''.<ref name="Tadié"/> In 1892, he was involved in founding a literary review called ''Le Banquet'' (also the French title of [[Plato]]'s ''[[Symposium (Plato)|Symposium]]''), and throughout the next several years Proust published small pieces regularly in this journal and in the prestigious ''[[La Revue Blanche]]''.

In 1896 ''[[Les plaisirs et les jours]]'', a compendium of many of these early pieces, was published. The book included a foreword by [[Anatole France]], drawings by Mme [[Madeleine Lemaire|Lemaire]] in whose ''salon'' Proust was a frequent guest, and who inspired Proust's Mme Verdurin. She invited him and [[Reynaldo Hahn]] to her [[Réveillon, Marne|château de Réveillon]] (the model for Mme Verdurin's La Raspelière) in summer 1894, and for three weeks in 1895. Despite the contents being well received, the book sold poorly due to its high price, which was widely ridiculed.<ref>{{cite web |title=Pleasures and Days 1 - Proust and the Arts |url=https://library.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/static/collections/proust/pleasures-and-days-1.html |website=library.harvard.edu |access-date=22 January 2025}}</ref> The price was due to the fact that the book was so sumptuously produced.{{Citation needed|date=January 2024}}

That year Proust also began working on a novel, which was eventually published in 1952 and titled ''[[Jean Santeuil]]'' by his posthumous editors. Many of the themes later developed in ''In Search of Lost Time'' find their first articulation in this unfinished work, including the enigma of memory and the necessity of reflection; several sections of ''In Search of Lost Time'' can be read in the first draft in ''Jean Santeuil''. The portrait of the parents in ''Jean Santeuil'' is quite harsh, in marked contrast to the adoration with which the parents are painted in Proust's masterpiece. Following the poor reception of ''Les Plaisirs et les Jours'', and internal troubles with resolving the plot, Proust gradually abandoned ''Jean Santeuil'' in 1897 and stopped work on it entirely by 1899.

Beginning in 1895 Proust spent several years reading [[Thomas Carlyle]], [[Ralph Waldo Emerson]], and [[John Ruskin]]. Through this reading, he refined his theories of [[art]] and the role of the artist in society. Also, in ''[[Le Temps retrouvé|Time Regained]]'' Proust's universal protagonist recalls having translated Ruskin's ''Sesame and Lilies''. The artist's responsibility is to confront the appearance of nature, deduce its essence and retell or explain that essence in the work of art. Ruskin's view of artistic production was central to this conception, and Ruskin's work was so important to Proust that he claimed to know "by heart" several of Ruskin's books, including ''[[The Seven Lamps of Architecture]]'', ''The Bible of Amiens'', and ''Praeterita''.<ref name="Tadié"/>

Proust set out to translate two of Ruskin's works into French, but was hampered by an imperfect command of English. To compensate for this he made his translations a group affair: sketched out by his mother, the drafts were first revised by Proust, then by Marie Nordlinger, the English cousin of his friend and sometime lover<ref name="carter">{{citation|title=Proust in Love|first=William C.|last=Carter|year=2006|publisher=YaleUniversity Press|isbn=0-300-10812-5|pages=[https://archive.org/details/proustinlove00cart/page/31 31–35]|url-access=registration|url=https://archive.org/details/proustinlove00cart/page/31}}</ref> [[Reynaldo Hahn]], then finally polished by Proust. Questioned about his method by an editor, Proust responded, "I don't claim to know English; I claim to know Ruskin".<ref name="Tadié"/><ref>Karlin, Daniel (2005) ''Proust's English''; p. 36</ref> ''The Bible of Amiens'', with Proust's extended introduction, was published in French in 1904. Both the translation and the introduction were well-reviewed; [[Henri Bergson]] called Proust's introduction "an important contribution to the psychology of Ruskin", and had similar praise for the translation.<ref name="Tadié"/> At the time of this publication, Proust was already translating Ruskin's ''Sesame and Lilies'', which he completed in June 1905, just before his mother's death, and published in 1906. Literary historians and critics have ascertained that, apart from Ruskin, Proust's chief literary influences included [[Louis de Rouvroy, duc de Saint-Simon|Saint-Simon]], [[Michel de Montaigne|Montaigne]], [[Stendhal]], [[Gustave Flaubert|Flaubert]], [[George Eliot]], [[Fyodor Dostoyevsky]], and [[Leo Tolstoy]].{{citation needed|date=March 2023}}

In Proust’s 1904 article "La mort des cathédrales" (The Death of Cathedrals) published in ''[[Le Figaro]]'', Proust called [[Gothic cathedrals and churches|Gothic cathedrals]] “probably the highest, and unquestionably the most original expression of French genius”.<ref>{{cite web | url=https://rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2015/01/the-death-of-cathedrals-and-venerable.html | title=RORATE CÆLI: THE DEATH OF CATHEDRALS – and the Rites for which they were built – by Marcel Proust (Full English translation) | access-date=29 September 2023 | archive-date=27 September 2023 | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230927094032/https://rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2015/01/the-death-of-cathedrals-and-venerable.html | url-status=live }}</ref>

1908 was an important year for Proust's development as a writer. During the first part of the year he published in various journals [[pastiches]] of other writers. These exercises in imitation may have allowed Proust to solidify his own style. In addition, in the spring and summer of the year Proust began work on several different fragments of writing that would later coalesce under the working title of ''[[Contre Sainte-Beuve]]''. Proust described his efforts in a letter to a friend: "I have in progress: a study on the nobility, a Parisian novel, an essay on [[Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve|Sainte-Beuve]] and [[Gustave Flaubert|Flaubert]], an essay on women, an essay on [[pederasty]] (not easy to publish), a study on stained-glass windows, a study on tombstones, a study on the novel".<ref name="Tadié"/>

From these disparate fragments Proust began to shape a novel on which he worked continually during this period. The rough outline of the work centred on a [[First-person narrative|first-person narrator]], unable to sleep, who during the night remembers waiting as a child for his mother to come to him in the morning. The novel was to have ended with a critical examination of Sainte-Beuve and a refutation of his theory that biography was the most important tool for understanding an artist's work. Present in the unfinished manuscript notebooks are many elements that correspond to parts of the ''Recherche'', in particular, to the "Combray" and "Swann in Love" sections of Volume 1, and to the final section of Volume 7. Trouble with finding a publisher, as well as a gradually changing conception of his novel, led Proust to shift work to a substantially different project that still contained many of the same themes and elements. By 1910 he was at work on ''À la recherche du temps perdu''.