From Childhood to Girlhood

Marie Bashkirtseff's diary was first published in 1887, and was only the second diary by a woman published in France till that date. It was an immediate success. British Prime Minister William Gladstone referred to her diary as 'a book without a parallel', and another early admirer was George Bernard Shaw. Her diary was cited as an inspiration by the American writer Mary MacLane, whose own shockingly confessional diary was written a bare generation later, and it was mentioned as a model by later writers who became known for their diaries, including Pierre Louÿs, Katherine Mansfield, and Anais Nin. Bashkirtseff's diary has been called 'a strikingly modern psychological self-portrait of a young, gifted mind,' and her urgent prose, which occasionally breaks out into dialogue, remains extremely readable. She was multilingual and despite her self-involvement, was a keen observer with an acute ear for hypocrisy, so that her diary also offers a near-novelistic account of the late nineteenth century European bourgeoisie. A consistent theme throughout her journal is her deep desire to achieve fame, inflected by her increasing fear that her intermittent illnesses might turn out to be tuberculosis.