Five months before her death of tuberculosis in 1884, Marie Bashkirtseff, an aspiring artist and a would-be mondaine, composed a preface to her personal diary. In it, she brazenly declared that in the event of her early death her diary was to be published. Three years later, a truncated version of the diary appeared. Translated into English, championed by BarrEs and Gladstone, taken up by young diarists from France to the US, the diary created a major sensation, remaining standard reading for young women in both the anglophone and francophone worlds until the 1930s.
The first full-length...