Time Regained by Marcel Proust first edition 1931

PROUST, Marcel; Stephen HUDSON [Trans.] 
Time Regained 
London: Chatto & Windus, 1931 
 
8vo., blue cloth lettered in gilt to spine; upper edge stained blue; outer edges untrimmed; together in the original dustwrapper, with price removed to centre portion of spine; pp. [xii], 433, [iii], with publisher’s device to title; a very good copy, boards slightly offset from removed price to spine;  endpapers and first few pages of text lightly spotted; with previous ownership name to ffep; the dustwrapper very good, save for the crude removal of the price to the spine, toned to panels and particularly so along spine, with some scratches and chips to edges, one larger chip to upper edge of front panel; closed tears repaired internally with tape. 
 
First UK edition, limited to 1300 copies of which 1250 were for sale. This copy no. 971. Part eight of Proust’s monumental novel ‘Remembrance of things past’, which originally appeared in seven volumes between 1913 and 1927.  
 
Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust (1871 – 1922) had been born during a particularly turbulent time of French History, and much of his pinnacle work was concerned with the vast changes in society which were occurring all around him as he grew up - from the end of the Franco-Prussian war to the suppression of the Paris commune, and the rise of the middle classes which coincided with a decline in the Aristocracy. He began writing from a young age, and published several pieces in literary journals while he was still in school. Inspired by such figures as Thomas Carlyle, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and John Ruskin, he began to write more prolifically, and by 1909 had started work on À la recherche du temps perdu. Initially revolving around the story of a first-person narrator who, unable to sleep, remembers waiting as a child for his mother to come to him in the morning (Proust had a famously close relationship with his mother and was devastated by her passing in 1905), the work morphed into a gargantuan project. When the final book was finally published in 1927 the total number of pages was over 3200, and featured more than 2000 characters, with a plot following the narrator's recollections of childhood and experiences into adulthood in late 19th-century and early 20th-century France. After a series of illnesses in 1922, Proust died before the final three volumes were published. They were subsequently edited by his brother Robert, and published posthumously. 
 
The present book is the eighth and final volume in the series, with a focus on the latter period of the First World War, and the years which follow. When they appeared in English from 1922 onwards, they did so in eight volumes, and it was C. K. Scott Moncrieff and who provided the translation of the first seven, with Hudson brought in after Moncrieff’s death in 1930. Here Hudson (pseudonym for Sydney Schiff) dedicates the volume ‘To the memory of my friend Charles Scott Moncrieff, Marcel Proust’s incomparable translator’. Schiff was himself a writer, and had met Proust while hosting a party in Paris on 18 May 1922. There, Proust had met James Joyce for the first time - it was also the night where Schiff attempted to get Picasso to paint a portrait of Proust, a request which was ultimately denied. 
 
Despite the price clipping on the spine, copies with the jacket so intact are scarce.