Whether the almanac had cramped her thoughts, and she had made complaints to that effect, or whether it was simply a kind idea and a suitable present, is not known. But it was over the Christmas of 1872 that Mary, like many girls of the same age before and since, began to keep a personal journal, in a leather-bound book given to her by her governess Miss Parr. It would be the first of three such volumes, spanning a period of over thirty years and breaking off only in the years immediately before the First World War. Their existence was known of afterwards because, at her death, Mary bequeathed them to a younger friend, the distinguished critic and memoirist Percy Lubbock, who used them as the basis of a memoir published in 1928. They were then thought to have disappeared for the better part of a century, before correspondence with members of the Cholmondeley family in the summer of 2005 led to the rediscovery of two of the volumes. Together they make an extraordinary document. It is not just that they give a privileged view of Mary's character, as she carefully delineates her own personal development; her descriptive powers are such that certain scenes almost seem to have been composed in colour, literally inviting the reader to see pictures behind the words. It comes as no surprise that she once wanted to be a painter, and it is less surprising still that she would eventually make her name in literature.

But the first entry shows no prescience of these things, beginning instead with a time-honoured formula and a certain lack of punctuation, ‘Miss Parr has written my name in this beautiful diary which she gave me yesterday namely Christmas Day’. She then goes on to her other presents, a book from her aunt Percy and a pencil case from her mother among them.