Journal Et Fragments: Publiés Avec L'assentiment De Sa Famille Par G. S. Trébutien

This is the private journal of Eugénie de Guérin, a young Frenchwoman who recorded her innermost thoughts in the years before her premature death from tuberculosis at age 38. Begun in November 1834 and continued until shortly before her death, the journal captures the interior life of an intelligent, deeply spiritual woman living in rural Languedoc, far from the literary circles her brother Maurice inhabited in Paris. Her entries reveal a soul perpetually suspended between joy and sorrow, faith and doubt, the beauty of the natural world and the shadow of mortality. The relationship with her brother is the spine of the journal, a bond of devotion that blurs the line between familial love and something more complicated. She writes about illness (her own and that of neighbors), the changing seasons on the estate, the prayers that sustain her, and the loneliness of a woman whose ambitions for intellectual life were constrained by her era and her health. The prose has a startling modernity: direct, unadorned, unafraid of silence. It is the record of a woman thinking honestly about existence in a time when such honesty was rare from women. For readers of Marie Bashkirtseff, for those drawn to spiritual autobiography, or anyone curious about the private selves history rarely preserves.