ABSTRACT
“I am the most interesting book of all”—thus Marie Bashkirtseff in the sprawling diary that, published just after her premature death in 1884, made her posthumously famous and energized the late nineteenth-century’s surging interest in artists’ life writing. It’s an intriguing idea—troping herself as book—with its merging of writer and written, its affirmation of self and book and its reflection through the genre on the genre itself: merging theorizing of the writing self and painting self with theorizing of the written and painted self.
