Proust’s Lesbianism – Elisabeth Ladenson Snelle Levering

For Decades, Elisabeth Ladenson says, critics have misread or ignored a crucial element in Marcel Proust’s fiction – his representation of lesbians. Her challenging new book definitively establishes the centrality of lesbianism as sexual obsession and aesthetic model in Proust’s vast novel A la recherche du temps perdu.
Traditional readings of the ‘Recherche’ have dismissed Proust’s “Gomorrah”- his term for women who love other women – as a veiled portrayal of the novelist’s own homosexuality.
More recently, …