Fanny Kemble: Leading Lady of the Nineteenth Century Stage: A Biography

by J.C. Furnas

This rich, leisurely biography is the first ever to utilize the full range of materials making up Fanny Kemble's dynamic story. Born into the greatest family of actors the English stage had ever known, she was proud and brilliant, a spirited, tragic rebel.

Hardcover

Published January 1, 1982

About the author

Full name: Joseph Chamberlain Furnas.

Reviews

[Wendy · Rating 1 out of 5]

I've always been into the Siddons/Kemble Shakespearean actor family and thought this one, with the added spice of Fanny Kemble's fervent fight as an abolitionist married to a slave trader would make it a brilliant story. The facts are certainly all there. However, Furnas's writing style was, to my ear, pretentious and confusing, mostly because he dispensed with commas to a high degree, and also because he would lapse into the kind of 'in-group' references that make biographies hard to digest. I found myself reading at a snail's pace, nodding off, sometimes stopping to try to SAY the sentences aloud to make them sensible and wondering how it SHOULD have been written. This was an exciting story that had its 'zing' buried under ponderous and odd language, some of it from the nineteenth century academic world. This is the longest I have taken to read any single book simply because I doggedly ploughed through it to the end, footnotes and all (and by the way, the index was a bit lacking) and realised that while Fanny Kemble was the Molly Brown of her time, she was certainly well and truly 'sunk' by this biographer who appeared more interested in rolling his syntax around in his brain than attending to story arc and character. The dynastic quality of English actors is fascinating, so many of them on-stage precursors to those of our generation, related by role rather than by blood, but so many times, Furnas appeared to repeat material rather than broaden his story to make these sparkling and relevant links (Kean, Terry, Gielgud etc.). I think that when the biographer puts himself at centre-stage rather than being an invisible force in story-telling, the book is compromised and even pompous.

[Melinda Thompson-Paine · Rating 1 out of 5]

I didn't finish this book.