Marcel Proust was born in 1871 and by his twenties was a conspicuous figure in fashionable Parisian society. After 1907, however, he rarely emerged from a cork-lined room in his apartment on the Boulevard Haussmann, devoting himself to his writing. He died in 1922 before the publication of the last three volumes of his great work.

The Narrator is a sensitive young man who wishes to become a writer, whose identity is kept vague. The Narrator's anxiety leads to manipulation, much like the manipulation employed by his invalid aunt Leonie and all the lovers in the entire book, who use the same methods of petty tyranny to manipulate and possess their loved ones.