Frances Anne Kemble (27 November 1809 - 15 January 1893), was a famous British actress and author in the early and mid nineteenth century.
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A member of the famous Kemble theatrical family, Fanny was the oldest daughter of actor Charles Kemble and Maria Theresa Kembble, and a niece of noted tragedienne Sarah Siddons and of the famous actor John Philip Kemble. Her younger sister was opera singer Adelaide Kemble. Fanny was born in London, and educated chiefly in France.
On 26 October 1829, Fanny Kemble first appeared on the stage as Juliet at Covent Garden. Her attractive personality at once made her a great favorite, her popularity enabling her father to recoup his losses as a manager. She played all the principal women's parts, notably Portia, Beatrice and Lady Teazle, but perhaps her greatest role, not as a lead part, was specially written for her when she played Julia in James Sheridan Knowles' The Hunchback.
In 1832, she accompanied her father on a theatrical tour of the U.S. While in Boston in 1833, she journeyed out to Quincy to witness the revolutionary technology of the first commercial railroad in the United States. She described her visit to the Granite Railway in her journal.
In 1834, she retired from the stage to marry an American, Pierce (Mease) Butler, grandson of the Founding Father Pierce Butler, and heir to a large fortune founded on cotton, tobacco and rice. When the couple married, he was not a slaveholder, but by the time their two daughters, Sarah and Frances, were born, Pierce Butler had inherited his grandfather's Sea Island plantations and the several hundred slaves who worked them. Fanny accompanied him to Georgia during the winter of 1838-39, and was shocked by the conditions of the slaves and their treatment. She tried to improve their conditions and complained to her husband about slavery. When she left his plantations in the spring of 1839, their debates about slavery and marital tensions continued. The couple was divorced in 1849, with Butler keeping custody of the two daughters. Fanny was reunited with each of her girls when they turned 21.
In 1847, Fanny returned to the stage. This was due more to a need to support herself following her separation from Butler than to any real interest in acting. Later, following her father's example, Fanny Kemble appeared with much success as a Shakespearean reader, touring from Massachusetts to Michigan, from Chicago to Washington.
Butler squandered a fortune estimated at $700,000, but was saved from bankruptcy by the March 2–3, 1859 sale of his 436 slaves at Ten Broeck racetrack, outside of Savannah, Georgia. It was the largest single slave auction in American history.[1] Following the American Civil War, he tried to make his plantations profitable with free labor, but was unsuccessful. Butler died in Georgia, of malaria, in 1867. Neither he nor Fanny ever remarried.
She kept a diary about her life on the Georgia plantation, which was circulated among abolitionists prior to the American Civil War, and was published both in England and the United States once the war broke out. She continued to be outspoken on the subject of slavery, and often donated money from her readings to charitable causes.
In Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-1839, published in 1863, Kemble wrote, "I have sometimes been haunted with the idea that it was an imperative duty, knowing what I know and having seen what I have seen, to do all that lies in my power to show the dangers and the evils of this frightful institution."
However, Kemble was not necessarily what she seemed. In 1930 Julia King claimed that Kemble's allegations about her grandfather Roswell King's mistreatment of slaves were false, and that Kemble, enamored of Mr. King, intentionally lied because he declined to return her affections (Kemble and Clinton 15-16; Julia King to ____, 24 October 1930). Historian Margaret Davis Cate maintained that Kemble had deliberately introduced deceptive content in her journal to enhance its dramatic appeal, thus undermining its credibility as a source of factual information (Kemble and Clinton 16).
Kemble's indictment of slavery did not preclude her own racist attitudes (Dickerson 28). She thought of slaves as filthy animals or "untrained savages" prone to laziness and stupidity. She disliked "the ignoble and ugly Negro type," their "coarse woolly hair" and the "displeasing conformation" of adult black faces with their flat noses and "white grinders," even going so far as to compare one of the black boatmen to "a large quadruped of the ape species" (David 162).
In 1877, Fanny returned to England, where she lived using her maiden name till her death. During this period, Fanny Kemble was a prominent and popular figure in the social life of London. She became a great friend of, and inspiration for, Henry James during her later years. His novel Washington Square (1880) was based upon a story Fanny had told him concerning one of her relatives.
Besides her plays, Francis the First (1832), The Star of Seville (1837), Fanny Kemble published a volume of poems (1844), and an Italian travel book entitled A Year of Consolation (1847). She published the first volume of her memoirs, entitled Journal, in 1835. In 1863, another volume of memoirs was published, entitled Journal of Residence on a Georgian Plantation, which dealt with life on her husband's southern plantation. In 1863 she also published a volume of plays, including translations from Alexandre Dumas, père and Friedrich Schiller. These were followed by Records of a Girlhood (1878), Records of Later Life (1882), Notes on Some of Shakespeare's Plays (1882), Far Away and Long Ago (1889), and Further Records (1891). Her various volumes of reminiscences contain much valuable material illuminating the social and dramatic history of the period.
Her older daughter Sarah married a doctor, Owen Jones Wister, and they had one child, Owen Wister. The younger Wister grew up to become a popular American novelist and author of the 1902 western novel, The Virginian.
Fanny's other daughter Frances defended her father in a rebuttal to her mother's journal, entitled Ten Years on a Georgian Plantation since the War (1883). In Georgia, she met British-born minister James Leigh, and the couple married in 1871. They tried to make her late father's plantations profitable with free labor, but were unsuccessful, and moved permanently to England in 1877. The couple had one daughter, Alice (b. 1874), who was with her grandmother Fanny when she died in England in 1893.
Numerous books have been written about Fanny Kemble and her family, including Fanny Kemble by Leota Stultz Driver (University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1933) and Fanny Kemble: A Passionate Victorian by Margaret Armstrong (The Macmillan Company, 1938). Many have focused on her role as an abolitionist, others on the theatrical careers of Fanny and her family. In the latter category, Henry Gibbs' Affectionately Yours, Fanny: Fanny Kemble and the Theatre (Jarrolds, London) saw eight editions published in English between 1945 and 1947.
Available through Harvard University Library's Open Collections Program: Women Working 1800-1930: