"The whole volume is an impassioned plea by Proust himself... it will enlighten readers of the novel...it should bestir critics to re-examine themselves." - NY Times Book Review
This important collection of critical essays is as revealing of the artistic development of Proust as it is incisive on the work of Goethe, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, George Eliot, Baudelaire, Balzac, Monet and Wagner. These essays, half criticism, half imaginative narrative, which were written to defy the conventional critical standards of his day, demonstrate the same process of thought he used to recast the novel form in Remembrance of Things Past.
"The collected essays are positive proof that Remembrance of Things Past was the culmination of a long, anxious, painstaking search that was never interrupted... The importance of this volume, in this faithful translation, will be immediately apparent to the readers of Proust. Simultaneous critic and novelist, he discusses the works of art which helped to train his sensibility." - The Saturday Review
TRANSLATED AND EDITED BY SYLVIA TOWNSEND WARNER.
