Fanny Kemble: A Performed Life

by Deirdre David

A ForeWord magazine Book of the Year for 2007

Charismatic, highly intelligent, and splendidly talented, Fanny Kemble (1809-93) was a Victorian celebrity, known on both sides of the Atlantic as an actress and member of the famous Kemble theatrical dynasty, as a fierce opponent of slavery despite her marriage to a wealthy slave owner, as a brilliantly successful solo performer of Shakespeare, and as the author of journals about her career and life on her husband's Georgia plantations. She was, in her own words, irresistible as a "woman who has sat at dinner alongside Byron . . . and who calls Tennyson, Alfred."

Touring in America with her father in the early 1830s, Kemble impulsively wed the wealthy and charming Philadelphia bachelor Pierce Butler, beginning a tumultuous marriage that ended in a sensational divorce and custody battle fourteen years later. At the time of their marriage, Kemble had not yet visited the vast Georgia rice and cotton plantations to which Butler was heir. In the winter of 1838, they visited Butler's southern holdings, and a horrified Kemble wrote what would later be published on both sides of the Atlantic as Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation . An important text for abolitionists, it revealed the inner workings of a plantation and the appalling conditions in which slaves lived. Returning to England after her divorce, she fashioned a new career as a solo performer of Shakespeare's plays and as the author of memoirs, several travel narratives and collections of poems, a short novel, and miscellaneous essays on the theater. For the rest of her life, she would divide her time between the two countries.

In the various roles she performed in her life, on stage and off—abolitionist, author, estranged wife—Kemble remained highly theatrical, appropriating and subverting nineteenth-century prescriptions for women's lives, ever rewriting the roles to which she was assigned by society and inheritance. Hers was truly a performed life, and in the first Kemble biography in twenty-five years to examine that life in its entirety, Deirdre David presents it in all its richness and complexity.

Genres: Biography

376 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 2007

Reviews

[Nicholas Whyte]

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1213349.html

David delivers on what she promises: assessing Kemble's career as one of continual performance. Her time as an actress was actually very brief - the five years before her marriage in 1834, and her first year back in England, 1847-8, after her marriage finally disintegrated. She continued to perform in other ways, though: she had a long and successful stage career doing solo readings of Shakespeare's plays, and David argues that her written words in her letters and journals (judiciously edited by herself for publication many years later, and the originals destroyed) are her most lasting performance before the audience of history (I paraphrase).

Kemble was a very intelligent and literate woman, who refused to be confined to her place as daughter or wife, and as a result became an object of fascination; as a young woman, she charmed Walter Scott; in her old age, she developed a deep friendship with the young Henry James and inspired him to write Washington Square. She was also an object of horror to her in-laws; her husband could not tolerate her desire to maintain her independence, and he and his family don't seem to have realised just how serious she was in her opposition to slavery.[return][return]David has done a fantastic job of analysing how Fanny Kemble constructed her performances, and has amassed a tremendous range of secondary (and even primary) material to show how they were received by her audience at the time, including the (rare) hostile reviews along with the positive. I feel that Kemble's charm is now explained for me without being disintegrated: David is clearly a little in love with her subject.

I was disappointed, therefore, that in her chapter on the 1838-39 plantation episode, David relies too uncritically on Kemble's own account. I would have liked more depth. We know that her reminiscences were attacked for inaccuracy when they were published twenty-five years later; I am aware that there were a number of other slave narratives out there which Kemble might have drawn on, and to which she can certainly be compared. David makes an interesting point about Kemble seeing herself as a sort of inverted Miranda, but the political context is missing.

While I'm complaining, two more points of irritation: David makes a couple of very silly slips on political context, describing Paris in the 1820s as being under Louis-Napoleon (he ruled from 1848 to 1870), and speculating about the chances of the Republican Party in the 1840 US presidential election (it was not founded until 1856). And the notes are infuriatingly placed at the end of the book, mostly just citing her sources, but occasionally with some really juicy nuggets of information, printed hundreds of pages from their context; with today's technology, there is no excuse for publishers screwing around their authors' texts in this way.

One last point that struck me: David chronicles Kemble's disastrous marriage and her more successful passionate friendships with women. But the most important man in her life, who provided the raw material for her successes on stage, inspired her to be a Portia or a Miranda, and to whom she wrote some of her more impassioned poetry, died almost two centuries before she was born (and like her was survived by two daughters). Shakespeare gets everywhere.

[Karen]

* Understanding Oppression: African American Rights (Then and Now)

A remarkable British abolitionist who married an American slave owner. She never felt comfortable and eventually divorced. #abolitionist