Enraptured with her own beauty, enraged by society's constraints upon women and determined to achieve fame and success at any price, Marie Bashkirtseff became one of the greatest artists of her century and she wrote a vivid portrait of a freethinking woman born decades before her time. In 1873, as a beautiful 14-year-old girl of Russian nobility—transplanted to a sun swept villa in Nice on the Mediterranean—Marie began inscribing in a little diary the events of her seaside days. Over the next eleven years she wrote thousands of pages, weaving a vast, multifaceted portrait of her life in the radiant Belle Époque world in which she lived. When she died of consumption at the age of twenty-five, she had become one of the most accomplished women of the age, leaving behind a great and dual artistic and literary legacy. Here, lavishly illustrated, is the fullest rendering of Marie Bashkirtseff's Journal ever published in English.