“Secretly Proustian”: Les Biches, Mrs. Dalloway , and In Search of Lost Time

This essay argues that choreographer Bronislava Nijinska’s ballet for the Ballets Russes, Les Biches , is an important yet overlooked contemporary of modernist literature. By offering a close, comparative study of the ballet, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway , and Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time: Sodom and Gomorrah , I demonstrate the ways in which Nijinska and Woolf are in conversation and in kinship with Proust, building on his depictions of homosexuality and his focus on the body in movement from their perspectives as women.