Born in 1871 in the Parisian suburb of Auteil, Marcel Proust led an active social life in his youth, penetrating the highest circles of wealth and aristocracy. He suffered from severe asthma, which worsened as he grew older, and his illness prompted him to withdraw from society and devote himself to writing. Swann’s Way was published in 1913, and only three more volumes of the six-volume novel were published in his lifetime. The second, Within a Budding Grove, won the Goncourt Prize and brought Proust instant fame in 1919. Proust died in 1922; the subsequent volumes were published posthumously.

In Swann’s Way, the themes of Proust’s masterpiece are introduced, and the narrator’s childhood in Paris and Combray is recalled, most memorably in the evocation of the famous maternal good-night kiss. The recollection of the narrator’s love for Swann’s daughter Gilberte leads to an account of Swann’s passion for Odette and the rise of the nouveaux riches Verdurins.

For this authoritative English-language edition, D. J. Enright has revised the late Terence Kilmartin’s acclaimed reworking of C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s translation to take into account the new definitive French editions of Á la recherché du temps perdu (the final volume of these new editions was published by the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade in 1989).