Born: 27 November 1809, United Kingfom
Died: 15 January 1893
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Frances Anne Butler, Fanny Butler
The following is excerpted from Famous Women: An Outline of Feminine Achievement Through the Ages With Life Stories of Five Hundred Noted Women. Written by Joseph Adelman, published 1926 by Ellis M Lonow Company.
Frances Anne Kemble, known as Fanny Kemble, an English actress and author, born in London, daughter of Charles Kemble. She made her first appearance on the stage at 1829, in the character of Juliet, reviving the fortunes of the Covent Garden Theatre under her father’s management. This was followed by a series of brilliant successes in Portia, Beatrice, Lady Teazle, and other parts, till she was compared to her famous aunt, Mrs. Siddons.
Her crowning triumph was as Julia in Sheridan Knowles’s play, The Hunchback, written expressly for her. In 1832 she accompanied her father to the United States, and met with an enthusiastic reception in the chief cities. Two years later she married Pierce Butler, a Georgia planter, and retired from the stage. The union proved unhappy, and in 1849 she secured a divorce.
About that time she commenced in Boston a series of Shakespearian readings which drew corded audiences. During the following years she gave public readings from Shakespeare and other dramatic authors in the principal cities of the United States and Great Britain, an occupation she much preferred to regular acting.
During the War of the Rebellion she resided in England and contributed valuable articles to the London Times on the evils of slavery. She was a prolific writer, and her various volumes of reminiscences contain much valuable material for the social and dramatic history of the period.
Fanny Kemble was a beautiful woman of magnificent presence, with a fine dramatic intelligence, and a flexible, harmonious voice. She inspired Longfellow’s sonnet, written after hearing one of her readings from Shakespeare:
“O Precious evenings! all too swiftly sped!
Leaving us heirs to amplest heritages
Of all the best the best thoughts of the great sages,
And giving tongues unto the silent dead!
How our hearts glowed and trembled as she read,
Interpreting by tones the wondrous pages
Of the great poet who foreruns the ages
Anticipating all that shall be said!
O happy Reader! having for thy text
The magic book, whose Sibylline leaves have caught
The rarest essence of all human thought!
O happy Poet! by no critic vext!
How must thy listening spirit now rejoice
To be interpreted by such a voice!”
The following is shared from The New Georgia Encyclopedia, which allows the use of protected materials for noncommercial educational purposes.
The British actress and writer Fanny Kemble’s infamous entanglement with Georgia began in the 1830s when she married Pierce Mease Butler, who in 1836 inherited his grandfather’s legacy, including hundreds of enslaved Africans and several plantations on the Sea Islands.
Frances Anne Kemble was born in 1809 into the first family of the British stage. After her debut in 1829 at Covent Garden in London, England, where she triumphed in the role of Juliet in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, she became an icon of the British stage; she achieved international stardom on her tour up and down the East Coast of the United States in the fall of 1832. She retired from her theatrical career after marrying Butler in June 1834 but hoped to pursue her literary interests. She became a best-selling author when her Journal of Frances Anne Butler appeared in 1835, and the book scandalized American readers with her candid assessments of her adopted country.
In December 1838 Kemble accompanied her husband and two young daughters to Butler’s vast holdings on St. Simons and Butler’s islands. Butler took his wife south despite her moral opposition to slavery, hoping a visit would rid her of her abolitionist bent. It was a miscalculated attempt: during the winter of 1838-39, Kemble’s diary became an impassioned eyewitness account of the wrongs of slavery. A devoted diarist, Kemble also offered commentary on fellow planters, as well as the flora and fauna of the islands, but her most acute observations involved her encounters with enslaved people.
Kemble’s riveting account of the men, women, and children her husband enslaved provides gripping insight on life in the antebellum South. As the wife of a planter, Kemble had unimpeded access to plantation affairs and was especially poignant and pointed when she allowed the voices of enslaved women, so seldom heard during this era, to shine through in the pages of her journal. Kemble’s battles with Butler over the harsh treatment of the people he enslaved contributed to the couple’s permanent impasse, which resulted in marital separation in 1845 and a divorce in 1849.
Although abolitionists encouraged Kemble to publish the vivid diary of her days in Georgia, she resisted their entreaties for more than two decades, so as not to antagonize Butler, who maintained custody of their two daughters until they came of age. During the Civil War (1861-65), Kemble became alarmed about foreign attitudes toward the Confederacy and published her Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-1839 in England in 1863. This book—an Englishwoman’s dramatic condemnation of the evils she had witnessed, the plantation life she had lived—caused a sensation as well. Although some have tried to credit this book with dissuading the British from official recognition of the Confederate States, it is clear that Kemble’s Georgian journal had a larger impact on general readers than on diplomatic decisions.
White southerners vilified the book; some continued to discredit Kemble’s account for more than a hundred years. Margaret Davis Cate, for example, published a scathing critique in the Georgia Historical Quarterly in 1960. Despite this campaign, the journal has become a classic and a reliable source for scholars investigating plantation life. Kemble’s descriptions of Georgia revealed her ambivalent attraction to the state, as she confessed, “I should like the wild savage loneliness of the far away existence extremely if it were not for the one small item of ‘the slavery.’” But it was this “one small item” that became a bone of contention between Kemble and Butler; and later Kemble and her younger daughter, Frances Butler Leigh, had bitter and protracted disagreements over this issue. (Indeed, Leigh wrote her own memoir of the region, published in 1883, Ten Years on a Georgia Plantation, which was intended as a direct refutation of many of her mother’s claims about race relations.) Kemble’s older daughter, Sarah, married Owen Jones Wister, a doctor from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. (Their son, Owen Wister, later wrote The Virginian [1902].)
Kemble eventually moved to Philadelphia, where she supported herself by touring the United States and Europe with her Shakespeare readings. She continued to travel until her death on January 15, 1893, in London.