Fanny Kemble's Journals

by Fanny Kemble, Catherine Clinton (Editor)

Henry James called Fanny Kemble's autobiography one of the most animated autobiographies in the language. Born into the first family of the British stage, Fanny Kemble was one of the most famous woman writers of the English-speaking world, a best-selling author on both sides of the Atlantic. In addition to her essays, poetry, plays, and a novel, Kemble published six works of memoir, eleven volumes in all, covering her life, which began in the first decade of the nineteenth century and ended in the last. Her autobiographical writings are compelling evidence of Kemble's wit and talent, and they also offer a dazzling overview of her transatlantic world.



Kemble kept up a running commentary in letters and diaries on the great issues of her day. The selections here provide a narrative thread tracing her intellectual development--especially her views on women and slavery. She is famous for her identification with abolitionism, and many excerpts reveal her passionate views on the subject. The selections show a life full of personal tragedy as well as professional achievements. An elegant introduction provides a context for appreciating Kemble's remarkable life and achievements, and the excerpts from her journals allow her, once again, to speak for herself.

Genres: Memoir, History, Biography

240 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1990

About the author

Frances Anne Kemble (27 November 1809 - 15 January 1893), was a famous British actress and author in the early and mid nineteenth century.

Reviews

[Rio (Lynne) · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn’t realize there’s two parts of this journal. The hardback version I bought was before she married Pierce Butler. It covers her coming to America and doing theater in New York, Philadelphia and Boston. I enjoyed it, but after about 80 pages in, it gets tedious. I feel both books could’ve been condensed into one.

[Edmund Roughpuppy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fanny Kemble was a successful actress in England, who came to America in the 1830s, married an American and lived briefly at his slave plantation in Georgia. She is a charming writer, her observations are entertaining and enlightening. Her life’s story is a sad one. She and slaveholding husband eventually divorced, and he was awarded custody of their two daughters until age 21. After crossing the Atlantic many times on sailing ships, Fanny settled finally in England, near one of her adult daughters. I released a sigh of relief. It’s something of a tragedy that she spent so much of her life’s energy in America, a country she intensely disliked.

Two portions of the journals interested me. One was her lackadaisical marriage to Pierce Butler. In the excellent introduction, Catherine Clinton writes:

Kemble claimed she had no idea about the source of her husband’s family money [slave plantations in Georgia], which is highly unlikely.

How often have we heard this song, and yes, sung it ourselves. “I should have noticed the red flags, but love blinded me.” Fanny was a protofeminist, and it disappointed me that she never looked back and said to herself, “I hated slavery, yet married a slave owner. That was a big mistake on my part.”

The second interest was Fanny’s first-hand account of conditions and practices on the plantation. All modern people abhor chattel slavery, but Fanny’s entries reveal the paucity of our imaginations; it was much worse than we can ever know. For example, the slaves on her husband’s plantation lived their lives covered continually by insects.

She also documents how slavery destroyed the spirit of the white population. All labor was considered unfit for white people, and they lost the ability to fend for themselves, even when reduced to starvation conditions. The white population also lived in a state of constant terror:

Sunday, April 14, 1839
I know that the southern men are apt to deny the fact that they do live under an habitual sense of danger; but a slave population, coerced into obedience, though unarmed, and half fed, is a threatening source of constant insecurity, and every southern woman to whom I have spoken on the subject has admitted to me that they live in terror of their slaves.

One of her daughters wrote a defense of her father, a rebuttal to Fanny’s published works. I want to read that. Meanwhile, fellow readers, let us take a moment to appreciate our 21st Century, with all its dangers and challenges, and send up gratitude that we were not chosen to live in the 19th.

[Christin · Rating 2 out of 5]

I kept reading Fanny Kemble's journals waiting desperately for the moment when she would dish on her marriage and come out and say her husband was an ass. Her criticism of him was more subtle, yet it seemed more damaging to her and all the more disturbing for that. I also longed for discourses on the beauty of the Shakespearean texts she was performing and came up sadly short.