Reading was so important to Marcel Proust that it sometimes seems he was unable to create a personage without a book in hand. Everybody in his work reads: servants and masters, children and parents, artists and physicians. The more sophisticated characters find it natural to speak in quotations. Proust made literary taste a means of defining personalities and gave literature an actual role to play in his novels. In this wonderfully entertaining book, scholar and biographer Anka Muhlstein, the author of Balzac’s Omelette, draws out these themes in Proust's work and life, thus providing not only a friendly introduction to the momentous In Search of Lost Time, but also exciting highlights of some of the finest work in French literature.

Proust's Cup of Tea analyzes Proust's reading of Victorian authors, and studies the ways in which they contributed to his monumental A la recherche du temps perdu. Eells illustrates how Proust made his fictitious painter Elstir into a master of ambiguity, by modeling his works on British art. As Proust aestheticized male and female homosexuality using references to British art and letters, Eells coins the term 'Anglosexuality' to refer to intersexuality represented through intertextuality. Proust's Cup of Tea proves that Victorian culture and homoeroticism form one of the cornerstones of Proust's masterpiece.

In 1899 Marcel Proust read a translation of Ruskin's The Lamp of Memory in a Belgian magazine. Fourteen years later he back-projected the experience onto the narrator of Du cote de chez Swann who describes himself as a boy reading the self-same piece in the garden at Combray. In between lay a period of intermittent enthusiasm for Victorian writing: a period which saw the refurbishment of Proust's method and a fundamental rethinking of his views. Much of this reassessment was achieved in relation to English writers whom Proust adopted, absorbed and then as often as not discarded. The end result was to enable him to pass from one aesthetic to another. It is the contention of this book that the clue to this process can be found not only in Proust's evolving views on memory and time but also in his progression through a three-fold typology of form: from 'mimetic form' (art-imitating-the-real) through 'mnemonic form' (art-imitating-memory) to 'abstract form' (art-imitating-itself). The progress from one to another is illustrated through Proust's reactions to Carlyle, Darwin, Emerson, Ruskin, George Eliot, Hardy, Stevenson, Wells and Wilde. There is also a chapter on the connection in Proust's mind between literary and art criticism and his delayed response to the Ruskin-Whistler trial of 1878. A final chapter relates these matters to the current debate as to the parallel between the nineteenth century fin-de-siecle and our own.

At the time of her death in after a long battle with cancer, Eve Sedgwick had been working on a book on affect and Proust, and on the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein. This volume, edited by Jonathan Goldberg, brings together a collection of her last work.