Marcel Proust was born in the Paris Borough of Auteuil on 10 July 1871, two months after the Treaty of Frankfurt formally ended the Franco-Prussian War. He was born during the violence that surrounded the suppression of the Paris Commune, and his childhood corresponded with the consolidation of the French Third Republic. Much of In Search of Lost Time concerns the vast changes, most particularly the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of the middle classes, that occurred in France during the Third Republic. In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower is Proust’s spectacular dissection of male and female adolescence, charged with the narrator’s memories. It was this volume that won the Prix Goncourt in 1919, affirming Proust as a major literary figure and dramatically increasing his fame. Here the narrator whose childhood was reflected in Swann’s Way moves further through childhood and into adolescence, as the author brilliantly examines themes of love and youth, in settings in Paris and by the sea in Normandy. Here, Proust introduces some of his greatest comic inventions, from the magnificently dull Monsieur de Norpois to the enchanting Robert de Saint-Loup. It is memorable as well for the first appearance of the two figures who for better or worse are to dominate the narrator's life - the Baron de Charlus and the mysterious Albertine. Enjoy free online English audiobook “In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower”, the second part of In Search of Lost Time, a novel in seven volumes by Marcel Proust.
