ABSTRACT
The dual focus of this study of Marcel Proust’s work is defined by its subtitle: homoeroticism and Victorian culture. The term ‘Victorian’ is used here as a loose definition of the corpus analysed, which extends both backwards to include some discussion of the father of Victorian novelists Walter Scott, and forwards in its concluding remarks about the work of their rebellious daughter Virginia Woolf. Proust was one of the first French translators of the eminent Victorian John Ruskin, whose work permeates his multi-volumed novel A la recherche du temps perdu (1913-27),1 most perceptibly in the section of Albertine disparue devoted to a stay in Venice. Ruskin’s influence transpires in the numerous references Proust makes to Renaissance painting and to such nineteenth-century British artists as J. M. W. Turner and members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. But Proust’s knowledge of Victorian works in English went beyond Ruskin, and he admitted to spending time in bed with the essayist who wrote on English Traits and Representative Men: ‘je suis encore couche lisant Emerson avec ivresse’/‘I am still in bed, drunk with reading Emerson.’2 He heartily recommended Stevenson’s adventure tales to a friend, and went so far as to claim that George Eliot and Thomas Hardy were among his favourite novelists.
