Introduction

Marie Bashkirtseff was born in 1858, in what is now called Ukraine, to parents of minor aristocratic stock. At the age of twelve she left with her mother and various members of her maternal family to live in Europe. Upon settling in Nice she began to keep a journal intime. As Philippe Lejeune has demonstrated, this was very much the done thing in the latter half of the nineteenth century if one were a young lady of good social standing. Mothers and governesses often encouraged diary keeping, occasionally even pushing their young daughters to produce entries that they would then read, in order to ensure that the appropriate moral values featured within them in a correct and well-turned style. For the jeune fille in her adolescent years, writing in her diary was as much a daily ritual as performing her toilette or practising the piano. Entries would be made desultorily or passionately, the journal considered as something of a chore or an opportunity to compose portraits of one's friends which might then be shared with them; whatever was made of it, whatever it came to represent for each individual jeune fille, keeping a journal intime was a widespread nineteenth-century feminine practice. ¹