Proust's Lesbianism

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 re