Frances Anne Kemble
From Philosopedia
Kemble, Frances Anne (Fanny) (27 Nov 1809-15 Jan 1893)
Kemble, an actress and playwright, was a Unitarian. An ardent writer against slavery, Kemble was the elder daughter of the famed English actor and manager, Charles Kemble, who in 1822 was manager of Covent Garden. Her aunt, Sarah Kemble Siddons, was the most distinguished actress of the Roger Kemble (1721—1802) family.
In 1829 Fanny made her debut as Juliet under her father’s management at Covent Garden, and she enjoyed such success that she went on to be the original Julia in Sheridan Knowles’s The Hunchback, written expressly for her.
In 1834 she married Pierce Butler, grandson of the Founding Father of the same name and a Unitarian who owned plantations in Georgia with seven or eight hundred slaves to run them. But her feelings about slavery, particularly when she broke the law by teaching one to read, led her to write the “Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-1839.” In her diary she wrote,
- The estate returned a full income under his [the overseer’s] management, and such men have nothing to do with sick slaves; they are tools, to be mended only if they can be made available again; if not, to be flung by as useless, without further expense of money, time, or trouble.
After several years of arguing about such issues, the Butlers separated. Fanny returned to England, wrote against slavery for the London Times, and finished her first novel at the age of eighty.
A friend of Henry James, she told him a story about one of her relatives that led him to write Washington Square, which was partly based upon her tale.
Kemble's daughter Sarah married Owen Jones Wister - their child Owen was author of the 1902 western novel The Virginian. Her other daughter, Frances Butler, took her father's side so far as the plantation was concerned - she unsuccessively tried to make the plantation profitable using free labor.
