The Seventy-Five Pages, out next month, contains germinal versions of episodes developed in In Search of Lost Time and opens ‘the primitive Proustian crypt’

For everyone who decided to bite the madeleine and read all 3,000-odd pages of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time during lockdown, what’s one more book? French publisher Gallimard has announced that it will be releasing a never-before-published work by the great French writer: Les Soixante-quinze feuillets, or The Seventy-Five Pages, on 18 March.

The texts in The Seventy-Five Pages were written in 1908, around the time Proust began working on In Search of Lost Time, which was published between 1913 and 1927. The papers were part of a collection of documents held by the late publisher Bernard de Fallois, who died in 2018. During his lifetime, De Fallois oversaw the posthumous publication of several Proust works including Jean Santeuil, Proust’s abandoned first novel from the 1890s.