Excerpt from Marie Bashkirtseff: The Journal of a Young Artist 1860-1884 A generation has passed since this self-revelation of a unique individuality, recorded with absolute fidelity to truth, was first given to the world. A revelation which, in the words of a reviewer of the Journal, at the time of its first appearance in an English translation in America, gives one the impres sion of a soul accustomed to other and higher spheres, which, caught and imprisoned in a human body, is filled with curiosity to investigate its new surroundings, possessed of an explorer's interest in the bound of being and a philosopher's desire to subject to analysis all the tense passions and emotions of which it finds itself possessed. A genuine human document. The sincerest reveal ment ever made to the world of the most intimate experiences of a human soul, of the most secret thoughts of a human heart. And pervading all the spirit of eternal Youth, the undying hope of Youth, the daunt less courage of Youth. A great book indeed. An immortal book, which has within itself the assurance of its immortality, the immortality which only Genius can confer. A book without a parallel, indeed, as the great English statesman and scholar, Gladstone, has called it. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Marie Bashkirtseff's diary is one of the great journals of all time: a Russian girl, transplanted to France, begins a little diary at the age of fourteen. Eleven years later, upon her death, she has written thousands and thousands of pages, creating an obsessively detailed monument to her own life. "...because I hope that I will be read...I am absolutely sincere. If this hook is not the exact, absolute, strict truth, it has no reason to be". But Bashkirtseff was betrayed by her own family. The diary, published posthumously in 1887, was expurgated, sanitized, and denuded. Marie's mother made sure that none of her daughter's more radical opinions - and more importantly, their strange family history - appeared in the diary's pages. Even so, it was hailed as the true portrait of a woman by the French press, and Bashkirtseff was alternately canonized as a misunderstood genius and damned as a self-absorbed misfit. Now, in this new translation, Phyllis Howard Kernberger has returned to the original text - Marie's notebooks, held in the Bibliotheque Nationale. Her scrupulous, decades-long research has unearthed the true self-portrait that Marie Bashkirtseff hoped to reveal. Marie was enraptured with her own beauty, enraged by the constraints of society (especially for women), and determined to achieve success and fame at any cost, and her diary is a vivid portrait of a free-thinking woman born before her time. Working straight from the source, Kernberger has revived the honest image of Marie - in a seductively funny, warmly personal, and thoroughly mesmerizing account of a life lived to its fullest.

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.