Maud Berkeley (1859-1949) was an amateur artist who sought no opportunity to share or publicise her work. She had a privileged and seemingly uneventful childhood and adolescence as an only child in York until her parents retired to the Isle of Wight in 1882, when Maud was 23. In 1888, she began to keep a diary recording her social life on the island, almost entirely pictorially. Sketching in pen and ink, watercolours and pastels, she records tea parties, tennis tournaments and dances, with a lightly satirical eye.