In the Shadow of Girls in Blossom

'I was at one of those periods in youth--vacant, without any particular love object--when, like a lover seeing his beloved in all things, we desire, we seek, we see Beauty everywhere.'

In the Shadow of Girls in Blossom, the second volume of Proust's In Search of Lost Time (1913-27), is a novel of exploration and (self-) discovery, continuing the story of the narrator's youth and adolescence. From the enclosed spaces of the fin-de-siècle social world that revolves around Madame Swann, we move to the fictional town of Balbec on the Normandy coast, a place where the social classes intermingle with mutual fascination. Against the ever-changing backdrop of the sea--a constant reminder of beauty, mutability, and the vastness of the world beyond individual human affairs--the narrator encounters individuals who will shape his experience and indelibly colour his outlook on that world. He finds a friend in the aristocratic Robert de Saint-Loup and is perplexed by his enigmatic uncle the Baron de Charlus; he finds a tutelary figure in Elstir, the gifted, idiosyncratic painter; and in Albertine he comes to recognise the blossoming girl who will become the love--and the bane--of his life.

The novel provides a breath-taking illumination of what it is to encounter beauty and to seek to understand our relation to it, in people, in experiences, in art, or the landscape around us. An exploration of the thrills of infatuation, the fallibility of perception, and how desire builds and ebbs, the narrative prepares readers for the love affair that will define the narrator's future existence and shape the volumes of In Search of Lost Time to come.

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Marcel Proust, ,Edward J. Hughes, Emeritus Professor of French, Queen Mary University of London,Adam Watt, Professor of French and Comparative Literature, University of Exeter

Charlotte Mandell has translated over fifty books, including works by Maurice Blanchot, Jonathan Littell, Gustave Flaubert, and Jean-Luc Nancy. Her translation of Compass by Mathias Énard was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize 2017 and was the recipient of the 2018 ALTA National Translation Award in Prose. In April 2021, she received the honour of Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from the French government.

Edward J. Hughes's career as a teacher of French in the University of London began in 1980. He was made Professor of French at Queen Mary, University of London in 2006 and elected Fellow of the British Academy in 2019. His research interests lie in the field of modern and contemporary French and Francophone literature, specialising in the socio-critical reading of a range of authors. He has a long-standing interest in the work of Marcel Proust on whom he has published numerous studies. He is a former President of the Society for French Studies.

Adam Watt is Professor of French & Comparative Literature at the University of Exeter, where he is Deputy Pro-Vice-Chancellor of the Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences. His books include Reading in Proust's A la recherche: le délire de la lecture (2009), The Cambridge Introduction to Marcel Proust (2011), a critical biography of Proust (2013); and, as editor, Marcel Proust in Context (2013) and The Cambridge History of the Novel in French (2021). He has published comparative work on Proust and a range of writers from Valéry, Rivière, Beckett, and Barthes to Eve Kosofsky-Sedgwick and Anne Carson.

AcknowledgementsGeneral Editor's PrefaceTranslator's NoteIntroductionNotes on the TextSelect BibliographyA Chronology of Marcel ProustIn the Shadow of Girls in BlossomMadame Swann's CirclePlace Names: The PlaceExplanatory Notes