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.

"Fanny Kemble played a highly significant cultural role on both sides of the Atlantic. As David so convincingly shows, the life of this actress-turned-writer-turned-polemicist not only offers a fascinating subject in its own right but also intersects with a host of nineteenth-century figures who still interest us today."-U. C. Knoepflmacher

About the Author
Deirdre David is Professor Emerita of English at Temple University. She is the author of several books, including Rule Britannia: Women, Empire, and Victorian Writing, and the editor of The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel.

Reviews
"Acclaimed, reviled, acclaimed again, Fanny Kemble played a highly significant cultural role on both sides of the Atlantic. As Deirdre David convincingly shows, the life of this actress-turned-writer-turned-polemicist not only offers a fascinating subject in its own right but also intersects with so many of the nineteenth-century figures who still interest us today: the Shelleys, the Brownings, Carlyle, Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, Liszt, Longfellow, Hawthorne, Henry James, and many, many more. David's absolute familiarity with all of them is impressive and reassuring, but it is of course Kemble herself who matters here most, and David's enormous empathy with this mercurial woman is wonderfully infectious." * U. C. Knoepflmacher, Princeton University *
"Fascination with Kemble . . . does not abate. This scholarly, erudite, and thorough study by David . . . far exceeds all others in its balance and in its careful analysis of this complex and variegated life. . . . A great addition to the literature on important women, the theater, and numerous aspects of the nineteenth century. . . . Highly recommended." * Choice *
"Deirdre David's book, meticulously researched and vividly readable, while consistently sympathetic to her subject, is always thoughtful, considered, nuanced, and illuminating. It evokes with equal success the theatrical world of nineteenth-century England and the plantation world of the antebellum South." * Journal of Victorian Culture *
"This very lively and engaging volume is a wonderful introduction into the world of one of the nineteenth century's most celebrated theatrical performers. . . . Distinctive and welcome . . . evocative and perceptive." * Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography *



Book Information
ISBN 9780812240238
Author Deirdre David
Format Hardback
Page Count 376
Imprint University of Pennsylvania Press
Publisher University of Pennsylvania Press