A guide to Swann's Way is irrelevant to readers who have found their own ‘way’ to Proust. It may appear irreverent as well, since it attempts to deal only with the opening volume of the seven which form the whole of his coherent novel, A la Recherche du temps perdu.

The novel is read to the end by a minority of those who make a start on it. The reason for this, apart from its length, may be that in Swann's Way, and especially in the first part of it, which editors have agreed to call Combray, there are problems resulting from an unfamiliar and original approach; they cease to be obtrusive once this unfamiliarity is overcome. To smooth the path into the first volume, however tentatively, may enable readers to continue with the rest. It was the author's heartfelt intention that the work should be experienced as a totality, and although he obstructed the likelihood of this by the additions he made to the intermediate sections - which, had he lived longer, might have been still more considerable - its true nature can be recognised only by journeying through it to the end. Those who succeed in this are apt to respond to Proust's injunction to start all over again. These are the readers who live with the book, as he lived with it for much of his adult life.

The aim of the present guide is to attend as closely as possible to the language used in the original while keeping in mind the particular questions an English reader is likely to ask; and to avoid misleading generalisations in discussing the text. For nearly sixty years English Proustians have had the benefit of an English rendering to which devoted care was given by the first translators, as it has been by their successors who have improved on it. That these translations are imperfect and unsatisfactory, as most translations are, has not prevented this audience from obtaining an idea of the worldview peculiar to the novel, or from forming their own individual attachment to the work.But to read it in French is a wholly different experience, and for those who find this impossible it may yet be of use to have parts of the French text juxtaposed to a close English version in which faithfulness, rather than elegance, is the principal aim.