Marcel Proust

She read voraciously, preferring writers with the geographical rootedness which she herself lacked: George Eliot , Thomas Hardy , Charles Dickens , and from beyond the English tradition Marcel Proust , James Joyce , Henry James

AL 's three sisters all married socially prominent Jewish husbands. The youngest, Violet , married art collector and patron Sydney Schiff ; their circle included Wyndham Lewis , T. S. Eliot , Katherine Mansfield , and Proust .

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...

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, and...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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

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...

The first reviewer, in the Sunday Observer, found DR 's narrative strategy extraordinary, but remarkably clear. He noted that her leaving the reader without explanations or apologies was not in the least troubling or...

Nancy Mitford called A Legacyone of the very best novels I've ever read.Evelyn Waugh called it entirely delicious . . . cool . . . elegant. Reviewing a reprint for the...