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Time Regained: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 6
The final volume of Marcel Proust’s masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time
Marcel Proust’s monumental seven-part In Search of Lost Time is considered by many to be the greatest novel of the twentieth century. In Time Regained, the final volume, edited and annotated by noted Proust scholar William C. Carter, Proust brilliantly resolves the novel’s main love and jealousy, grief and oblivion, time and memory, and the purpose of art and literature. Among the famous passages is the “masked ball” in which the Narrator, after a long absence from society, attends a party at the Prince de Guermantes’s and at first fails to recognize his old acquaintances because of the changes wrought by the passage of time. The concluding pages, in which the Narrator recovers his will and discovers the subject matter of his future book, contain many observations about life and art that will remain in our memories.
For Time Regained, Carter uses the translation by Andreas Mayor, a successor to the translations of the previous volumes by Charles Kenneth Scott Moncrieff, who died before finishing this volume.
Marcel Proust’s monumental seven-part In Search of Lost Time is considered by many to be the greatest novel of the twentieth century. In Time Regained, the final volume, edited and annotated by noted Proust scholar William C. Carter, Proust brilliantly resolves the novel’s main love and jealousy, grief and oblivion, time and memory, and the purpose of art and literature. Among the famous passages is the “masked ball” in which the Narrator, after a long absence from society, attends a party at the Prince de Guermantes’s and at first fails to recognize his old acquaintances because of the changes wrought by the passage of time. The concluding pages, in which the Narrator recovers his will and discovers the subject matter of his future book, contain many observations about life and art that will remain in our memories.
For Time Regained, Carter uses the translation by Andreas Mayor, a successor to the translations of the previous volumes by Charles Kenneth Scott Moncrieff, who died before finishing this volume.
- GenresFiction
442 pages, Hardcover
Published May 27, 2025
2 people are currently reading
8 people want to read
About the author
Marcel Proust
2,144 books7,418 followersMarcel Proust was a French novelist, best known for his 3000 page masterpiece À la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past or In Search of Lost Time), a pseudo-autobiographical novel told mostly in a stream-of-consciousness style.
Born in the first year of the Third Republic, the young Marcel, like his narrator, was a delicate child from a bourgeois family. He was active in Parisian high society during the 80s and 90s, welcomed in the most fashionable and exclusive salons of his day. However, his position there was also one of an outsider, due to his Jewishness and homosexuality. Towards the end of 1890s Proust began to withdraw more and more from society, and although he was never entirely reclusive, as is sometimes made out, he lapsed more completely into his lifelong tendency to sleep during the day and work at night. He was also plagued with severe asthma, which had troubled him intermittently since childhood, and a terror of his own death, especially in case it should come before his novel had been completed. The first volume, after some difficulty finding a publisher, came out in 1913, and Proust continued to work with an almost inhuman dedication on his masterpiece right up until his death in 1922, at the age of 51.
Today he is widely recognized as one of the greatest authors of the 20th Century, and À la recherche du temps perdu as one of the most dazzling and significant works of literature to be written in modern times.
Born in the first year of the Third Republic, the young Marcel, like his narrator, was a delicate child from a bourgeois family. He was active in Parisian high society during the 80s and 90s, welcomed in the most fashionable and exclusive salons of his day. However, his position there was also one of an outsider, due to his Jewishness and homosexuality. Towards the end of 1890s Proust began to withdraw more and more from society, and although he was never entirely reclusive, as is sometimes made out, he lapsed more completely into his lifelong tendency to sleep during the day and work at night. He was also plagued with severe asthma, which had troubled him intermittently since childhood, and a terror of his own death, especially in case it should come before his novel had been completed. The first volume, after some difficulty finding a publisher, came out in 1913, and Proust continued to work with an almost inhuman dedication on his masterpiece right up until his death in 1922, at the age of 51.
Today he is widely recognized as one of the greatest authors of the 20th Century, and À la recherche du temps perdu as one of the most dazzling and significant works of literature to be written in modern times.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
July 8, 2025
With the publication by Yale University Press of his edition of Time Regained on May 27, 2025, William C. Carter has achieved a monumental effort in Proustian Studies, editing and annotating what is for me—indubitably—the definitive edition of In Search of Lost Time in the English speaking world.
As a set overall, it is fascinating to see how Carter manages to edit and annotate all of In Search of Lost Time.
Statistically speaking, the six volumes accumulates to 3482 pages of pure text excluding the acknowledgements, introductions, and synopses at the end of the volumes, with a grand total of 5115 annotations spread out across all six volumes.
The biggest caveat for the entire set that goes without saying is the price tag. $26 for the first three paperbacks and $85 for the last three hardcovers is prohibitively expensive for the average reader, and it is unfortunate Yale University Press decided to price it as such.
That being said, if one is able to afford the entire set, Carter’s revision of the Andreas Mayor translation is to be lauded, bringing it closer to the 1987-89 Pleiade edition, restoring the original opening, reversing the second and third paragraphs, etc. and aggressively, exhaustively revising the text more thoroughly than either Kilmartin or Enright ever did so.
With this enormous achievement, there are many possible directions that Proust scholars can take the editing of In Search of Lost Time and Proust’s body of work overall in, now that Proust has been definitively annotated in English.
With Yale actually having acquired the rights to the Andreas Mayor translation from Modern Library, it is to be wished that a publisher would translate the drafts of In Search of Lost Time from both Pleiade editions, and acquire the rights to both the Jean Santeuil and Contre Sainte-Beuve translations, and potentially reprint both works, both of which have not had a retranslation since the 1950’s!
I am not suggesting that Carter himself does that, (obviously with his exhaustion and relief after 12 years editing and annotating the Yale edition), only as a possibility for other Proust scholars to take up the torch and move in new directions!
I think at this point, with Oxford embarking on their own translation project of Proust, the market is becoming increasingly saturated with too many translations of In Search of Lost Time, and I think there is a real market out there for other aspects of Proust’s oeuvre to be explored and appreciated in English.
But in conclusion, this is a remarkable achievement by Professor Carter, and I am proud to be the first to review this incredible edition.
As a set overall, it is fascinating to see how Carter manages to edit and annotate all of In Search of Lost Time.
Statistically speaking, the six volumes accumulates to 3482 pages of pure text excluding the acknowledgements, introductions, and synopses at the end of the volumes, with a grand total of 5115 annotations spread out across all six volumes.
The biggest caveat for the entire set that goes without saying is the price tag. $26 for the first three paperbacks and $85 for the last three hardcovers is prohibitively expensive for the average reader, and it is unfortunate Yale University Press decided to price it as such.
That being said, if one is able to afford the entire set, Carter’s revision of the Andreas Mayor translation is to be lauded, bringing it closer to the 1987-89 Pleiade edition, restoring the original opening, reversing the second and third paragraphs, etc. and aggressively, exhaustively revising the text more thoroughly than either Kilmartin or Enright ever did so.
With this enormous achievement, there are many possible directions that Proust scholars can take the editing of In Search of Lost Time and Proust’s body of work overall in, now that Proust has been definitively annotated in English.
With Yale actually having acquired the rights to the Andreas Mayor translation from Modern Library, it is to be wished that a publisher would translate the drafts of In Search of Lost Time from both Pleiade editions, and acquire the rights to both the Jean Santeuil and Contre Sainte-Beuve translations, and potentially reprint both works, both of which have not had a retranslation since the 1950’s!
I am not suggesting that Carter himself does that, (obviously with his exhaustion and relief after 12 years editing and annotating the Yale edition), only as a possibility for other Proust scholars to take up the torch and move in new directions!
I think at this point, with Oxford embarking on their own translation project of Proust, the market is becoming increasingly saturated with too many translations of In Search of Lost Time, and I think there is a real market out there for other aspects of Proust’s oeuvre to be explored and appreciated in English.
But in conclusion, this is a remarkable achievement by Professor Carter, and I am proud to be the first to review this incredible edition.
Displaying 1 of 1 review