The Captive

'Jealousy ... is a demon that can't be exorcized, always reincarnated in new forms'

The fifth volume of Proust's In Search of Lost Time focuses principally on the protagonist's relationship with Albertine during their cohabitation in Paris. However, The Captive is no conventional love story. Proximity and intimacy breed anxiety and suffering on account of the protagonist's jealousy. His wildly active mind weighs and appraises Albertine's every word. Is she lying to conceal infidelities or past indiscretions, or plotting her departure to indulge in lesbian affairs? The book carries echoes of Swann's affair with Odette narrated in the novel's first volume and offers an anatomy of love as 'mutual torture'. The societal evolution of Belle Époque Paris remains the backcloth to the volume's dramas, as the Verdurins' social rise continues and the Baron de Charlus is unceremoniously brought low in their salon.

The Captive is an intense work, unsettling in how it draws us into the protagonist's thoughts and, on occasion, implicates us in his cruelty. Yet it also, insistently, provides glimpses of the promise of art, the possibility it offers to lift us into a dimension beyond the stress and suffering of the here and now.

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Marcel Proust

Andrew Rothwell is Emeritus Professor of French and Translation Studies at Swansea University. His translations from the French include poetry by Bernard Noël, Jean-Michel Maulpoix, and Jacques Dupin, novels by Bruno Dumont, and essays by Francis Jacques and Jacques Derrida. He has previously translated two novels by Émile Zola for Oxford World's Classics, Thérèse Raquin and The Bright Side of Life (La Joie de vivre).


Elisabeth Ladenson teaches at Columbia University. She is the author of Proust's Lesbianism and Dirt for Art's Sake: Books on Trial from Madame Bovary to Lolita.

Adam Watt is Professor of French & Comparative Literature at the University of Exeter. His books include Reading in Proust's A la recherche: le délire de la lecture (2009), The Cambridge Introduction to Marcel Proust (2011), a critical biography of Proust (2013); and, as editor, Marcel Proust in Context (2013) and The Cambridge History of the Novel in French (2021). His edition of Alain-Fournier's The Lost Domain (Le Grand Meaulnes) appeared in 2025.

Brian Nelson is an Emeritus Professor at Monash University and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. His publications include Zola: A Very Short Introduction, The Cambridge Introduction to French Literature, The Cambridge Companion to Zola, Zola and the Bourgeoisie, and translations of Zola's The Assommoir, His Excellency Eugène Rougon, Earth (with Julie Rose), The Fortune of the Rougons, The Belly of Paris, The Kill, Pot Luck and The Ladies' Paradise. He has also translated The Swann Way by Marcel Proust. He was awarded the New South Wales Premier's Prize for Translation in 2015.