It is a temptation for critics to suppose their chosen subject an exception to many rules. However, in the matter of his notions about his reading public, Proust is exceptional by any standard. For most of his life he wrote much and published little. His translations of Ruskin ﹛Sesame and Lilies [1865], and the Bible of A miens [ 1884], with prefaces for French readers) were by far the longest works he completed in his first ten years of writing. Jean Santeuil, abandoned in 1902, was not published until 1952. The short stories Les Plaisirs et les jours, which appeared in 1896, and some sketches, pastiches and articles, brought, from a limited circle, an enthusiastic response for which their author was tremulously grateful. These slight works were all that was available until 1913, when Swann's Way was published at the author's expense. The series of chapters, primarily of literary criticism, entitled Contre Sainte-Beuve, was probably set aside by 1910, but remained unknown till it was edited by Bernard de Fallois in 1954; the volume includes, in sketched form, some material which found its full development in La Recherche, and its publication, forty years after Swann 's Way, marked a revolution in Proustian studies.

It was thus only in the last eight years of his life that Proust came to believe in the possibility of sympathetic acclaim from a wider, more general reading public. We may justifiably suppose that he wrote to a great extent for himself, and with a few friends in mind; and since the novel uses the subject of reading very freely as a means of conveying the inner life, we may also imagine that he wrote for people much like those who figure in it.

When these characters function in La Recherche as readers, they fall into two broad categories, those of Guermantes and those of Combray, the worldly and the unworldly. The first kind make a cult of their own standards of behaviour, and demand instinctively that writers conform to them. Mme de Villeparisis, who belongs by birth to the noble family of Guermantes, provides a striking example when she reproaches the poet Alfred de Vigny with having placed ridiculous emphasis on his own descent from the minor gentry, and the novelist Honore de Balzac with attempting to depict social circles into which he was never admitted.