On October 5, 1829, the audience at Covent Garden Theatre eagerly awaited the acting debut of Frances Anne Kemble (known always as Fanny).¹ The packed house had enjoyed the overture to The Magic Flute, and now the noisy crowd in the pit polished off its meat pies and the better-behaved people in the boxes adjusted their shawls and stopped scrutinizing their neighbors. The play was Romeo and Juliet and much was promised: a funeral procession in Act V with a solemn dirge, Fanny’s vivacious mother as Lady Capulet, her darkly handsome father as Mercutio, and the first stage appearance of...

Newman Street, where Fanny Kemble was born on November 27, 1809, runs north from Oxford Street, close to the Tottenham Court Road end of what is now London’s busiest and gaudiest shopping thoroughfare. In 1809, Oxford Street was called the Oxford Road, and it was the principal route west out of London. None of the great emporia that were built in the nineteenth century to satisfy the shopping needs of England’s bustling and burgeoning middle class was in existence, and Newman Street itself was a terraced enclave of boardinghouses, replaced now by a rather nondescript parade of advertising agencies, printing...

Harriet St. Leger was unlike any other woman Fanny Kemble had ever met. A member of a reclusive Anglo-Irish country family, she lived at Ardgillan Castle, a fine eighteenth-century manor house set close to the cliffs about fifteen miles north of Dublin. The daughter of the Hon. Richard St. Leger and a granddaughter of Viscount Doneraile of County Cork, she had lived at the castle for some fifteen years with her sister Marianne and Marianne’s husband, a Church of Ireland cleric, at the time of meeting Kemble. Harriet was tall, angular, and athletic, with cropped chestnut hair and fine gray...

In the summer of 1830, following the custom for Covent Garden actors to tour the provinces after a successful metropolitan season, Fanny Kemble and her father set off for Bath, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dublin, Liverpool, Manchester, and Birmingham. Dall accompanied them as Fanny’s chaperone and Thérèse occasionally joined the group when they were invited to a country house for the weekend. Back in London, the Tory party was nearing the end of a quarter century’s control of government, and by the autumn of 1830 their leader, the Duke of Wellington, had lost a vote of confidence in the House of Commons...

When Fanny Kemble boarded the sailing ship Pacific in Liverpool on August 1, 1832, bound for New York, she and her fellow passengers faced a voyage of almost five weeks. It was not until 1838, when the Great Western made the trip entirely under steam in a space of fifteen days, that transatlantic travel harnessed the power so thrilling to Kemble as she rode beside George Stephenson on his marvelous new “Rocket” in the summer of 1830. Five weeks at sea and two years in America called for careful planning, and the Kemble party arrived in Liverpool with twenty-one huge...

When the Kemble party left Boston in the summer of 1833 on a holiday trip to Niagara, Fanny was delighted to leave the humid cities of the Northeast, relieved to be free of her duties in the theater (at least for a while), and eager to see the countryside in upstate New York. More and more, she felt the tension between various antagonistic forces her life: the hatred of acting and the need to work for the Kemble family; the feminist sentiments and the social codes that dictated female subordination to male governance; the desire to work on her writing...

Fanny Kemble Butler’s American Journal created transatlantic outrage when it was published in June 1835, just a week after the birth of her first child, Sarah Butler, on May 28. English newspapers accused her of impertinent ingratitude, and American readers thought her tone supercilious, her abolitionism naive. The barrage of hostile criticism ranged from royal dismissal to wicked parody, but none of this seemed to matter in terms of sales; the Journal’s immediate notoriety probably spurred the sale of eight hundred copies in the first week by one New York bookstore, Wiley and Long.¹ For many readers on both sides...

Fanny Kemble’s experience in Georgia was far removed from romanticized notions that exist in the popular imagination of prebellum life on a Southern plantation. Rather than being a colonnaded white mansion, the plain brick Butler house consisted of three rooms and an attached outside kitchen; rather than being protected by smiling in-house black servants, Kemble was confronted daily by hundreds of female slaves who worked long hours in the fields and expected her to intercede on their behalf with the master; and instead of living with an indulgent father or adoring husband, she shared a home with Pierce Butler, a...

On May 26, 1843, John Barlow, a clergyman and honorary secretary of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, delivered a lecture at the institution titled “On Man’s Power over Himself to Prevent or Control Insanity.” Shortly thereafter, Barlow published the lecture, and in 1849, under the same title, the prolific London publisher and bookseller William Pickering issued a second edition. Today, in the Special Collections Library of the University of Virginia one can find an annotated and underlined copy of the Pickering edition inscribed with Fanny Kemble’s name: the name and the annotations are all in Kemble’s handwriting and it...

Philadelphia in early June 1843 was hot and humid, weather Kemble found unbearable, and the heavy atmosphere seemed to be conspiring with Pierce’s aim to make her life so miserable she would have no choice but to leave him. But even if the oppressive weather was deepening Kemble’s melancholy, she was determined to fight Pierce with all she had, which, admittedly, was not much beyond a rebellious spirit. The best she could hope for was that he would become so weary of her inconvenient presence and so exasperated by her refusal to fade away into the dubious moral shadows of...

As she performed her Shakespeare readings, Fanny Kemble was not only judged by her listeners as supremely equal to the “noble task” she feared might defeat her; she was, in the words of Henry James, “saturated” in the language of her “master.” According to James, she made Shakespeare “the air she lived in, an air that stirred with his words whenever she herself was moved, whenever she was agitated or impressed, reminded or challenged. He was indeed her utterance, the language she spoke when she spoke most from herself.”¹ Having attempted with varying degrees of success up until the moment...

When Fanny Kemble wrote about America in September 1832, she had readily adopted a metaphor common to much nineteenth-century British writing about its lost colonies: that of mother country and rebellious child. Although she was sure the new nation would perpetuate the English language and English virtues, she regretted that when the American colonies became politically restless in the late eighteenth century, England had not adopted “a more maternal course of conduct.” When she was in Georgia, she spoke frequently in her letters to Elizabeth Sedgwick about her national identity as a principled Englishwoman in the midst of immoral slavery...

Harriet St. Leger died a few weeks after Fanny Kemble wrote to her from Switzerland with the promise that she would soon be in Ireland, called by the moving song of a friendship that had lasted fifty years. During the last year of Harriet’s life, Kemble had visited her beloved old friend and was prepared for her death—when she traveled to England in 1877 after three years away from Europe, she got off the steamer at Queenstown and rushed to her side—but the loss of Harriet was still a sad blow. In the following summer of 1879, she...