ABSTRACT
The relationship of literature to the place in which it is produced has generally been a neglected issue in literary studies. This matter immediately raises a number of questions about how we conceive of such a relationship. What connection exists between the space in which an author writes and the work he or she creates, and how do ideas about literature current at the time shape the environment an author constructs in order to write in? To what extent does an author’s studio need to be seen not simply as a private space but as a space of literary self-fashioning? These issues seem important for Proust’s work. Few writer’s rooms are so emblematic as Proust’s cork-lined bedchamber at his second storey apartment at no. 102 Boulevard Haussmann. Proust moved into the apartment on the fashionable new Parisian boulevard, in 1906, and it was here he began À la recherche du temps perdu. It might be said that it was while he was at this address that he first became a novelist, for despite a prolific output of short stories, literary sketches and criticism for newspapers and symbolist reviews, his early aspirations as a novelist had resulted in only the aborted Jean Santeuil. 1 Proust was to stay at the Boulevard Haussmann for the next thirteen years semi-invalided for much of the time due to the gradual worsening of the severe asthma he had contracted as a child, and it was in the apartment’s bedroom that doubled as a studio, he wrote most of the manuscript of his novel. 2
