Even Andre' Gide passed on the manuscript.

A new, compact, biography tackles- anew- an age old question:

Instead of plodding through Proust’s early life again, Taylor concentrates on the 38-year-old’s Cinderella-like transformation from high-class layabout into a great literary artist. How, Taylor wants to know, did the snobbish, sissy young man who spent a decade flirting with hideous old duchesses and going home with handsome young waiters finally find the discipline to take permanently to his bed at 102 Boulevard Haussmann and start smelting pure gold out of glitzy dross? How did all that simpering chat and gossip turn into a work of profound moral seriousness, providing us with the best account we will ever have of why love feels like a sickness and what was actually at stake in the Dreyfus affair?

And, one reviewer notes, in some ways, Proust's masterpiece is a remembrance of things barely past:

Tenses are crucial too for Taylor, who is fascinated by the way in which moments that occurred 100 years ago live on today. Particularly gripping is the fact that people who were important to Proust managed to live on into our own time. There was a boyfriend called Albert who became the model for the narrator’s great love Albertine and didn’t die until 1979. And what about the rich Romanian Princess Soutzo who lavishly hosted Proust at the Ritz, Ciro’s and the Crillon and was still to be found, mouldering away with her Nazi collaborationist husband, in her grand mansion on Avenue Charles-Floquet right into the age of Chirac? 

Perhaps even more remarkable is that certain key documents relating to Proust, who died in 1922, are still under embargo. Chief among these are the diaries of Reynaldo Hahn, an early lover and lifelong friend, which represent “the holy grail of Proust biographers” yet will not be opened until 2036. Likewise, letters to another closeted lover, Lucien Daudet, are out of reach in private hands, perhaps out of embarrassment, given that Daudet later married. Such stonewalling might seem quaint or priggish, or just very French. Nonetheless, for Taylor such recalcitrance serves as an endorsement of Proust’s central conceit that the past is never dead as long as memory is in play.