Frances Anne Kemble – författare

This file includes: Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation 1838-1839, Poems (1844), Records of a Girlhood, Records of Later Life, and Letters of Edward Fitzgerald to Fanny Kemble 1871-1883. According to Wikipedia: "Frances Anne Kemble (27 November 1809 - 15 January 1893), was a famous British actress and author in the early and mid nineteenth century… In 1834, she retired from the stage to marry an American, Pierce Butler, grandson of the Founding Father Pierce Butler, and heir to a large fortune founded on cotton, tobacco and rice... Butler squandered a fortune estimated at $700,000, but was saved from bankruptcy by the March 2–3, 1859 sale of his 436 slaves at Ten Broeck racetrack, outside Savannah, Georgia—the largest single slave auction in American history. Following the American Civil War, he tried to make his plantations profitable with free labor, but was unsuccessful. Butler died in Georgia, of malaria, in 1867. Neither he nor Fanny ever remarried... In 1877, Fanny returned to England, where she lived using her maiden name till her death. During this period, Fanny Kemble was a prominent and popular figure in the social life of London. She became a great friend of and inspiration for Henry James during her later years. His novel Washington Square (1880) was based upon a story Fanny had told him concerning one of her relatives... Her various volumes of reminiscences contain much valuable material illuminating the social and dramatic history of the period. Her elder daughter Sarah married a doctor, Owen Jones Wister, and they had one child, Owen Wister (b. 1860), the popular American novelist and author of the 1902 western novel, The Virginian."

A personal indictment of the institute of slavery in the Southern United States, as witnessed directly by Fanny Kemble, a British actress in 1838 and 1839. Her husband, the heir to the plantations in Georgia, however, forebade her to publish this material on pain of never seeing her daughters again. She complied, until the two daughters had reached the age of twenty-one, and then allowed the journal to be published in 1863, when the Northern troops were already present along the coast near the Altamaha River, where the plantations were located. In a very personal way, she relates her many varied experiences, efforts to make life easier for the slaves despite her husband’s stubborn resistance. As an English citizen, she had seen the total end of slavery throughout the British Empire in 1833, just a few years before her journey to Georgia. She ends her account with a stirring defense of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which had raised such a storm of controversy in the United States. Like Stowe, Kemble sees all sides of the situation, with her eyes and with her heart.