Chasing Lost Time

C. K. Scott Moncrieff s celebrated translation of Proust s A La Recherche du Temps Perdu was first published in 1922 and was a work which would exhaust and consume the translator, leading to his early death at the age of just forty. Joseph Conrad told him, I was more interested and fascinated by your rendering than by Proust s creation : some literary figures even felt it was an improvement on the original.From the outside an enigma, Scott Moncrieff left a trail of writings that describe a man expert at living a paradoxical life: fervent Catholic convert and homosexual, gregarious party-goer and deeply lonely, interwar spy in Mussolini s Italy and public man of letters a man for whom honour was the most abiding principle. He was a decorated war hero, and his letters home are an unusually light take on day-to-day life on the front. Described as offensively brave , he was severely injured in 1917 and, convalescing in London, became a lynchpin of literary society friends with Robert Graves and Noel Coward, enemies with Siegfried Sassoon and in love with Wilfred Owen.Written by Scott Moncrieff s great-great-niece, Jean Findlay, with exclusive access to the family archive, Chasing Lost Time is a portrait of a man hurled into war, through an era when the world was changing fast and forever, who brought us the greatest epic of time and memory that has ever been written.