Kemble, Fanny, 1809-1893,. Autograph letters signed from Fanny Kemble to various recipients [manuscript], 1831-1890.
Title:
Autograph letters signed from Fanny Kemble to various recipients [manuscript], 1831-1890.
Correspondents: Lady [Anne] Byron, F[rances Power] Cobbe, William [Bodham] Donne, Henry [William] Greville, Mary Charlotte Lloyd and Harriet St. Leger. Includes 167 letters, many letters incomplete, and 9 leaves from her journals. Many of the letters describe her experiences in America and her views on slavery and on the Civil War. Letters written from London, Ireland, Switzerland, Italy and the United States. A letter to Donne (307) tells of John Brown's Raid and castigates him as a "fanatic maniac." Some letters to Greville discuss New England's reactions to the possibility of England's entering the war. Several letters touch on Shakespeare. Othello is a sermon against inordinate affections. She did like [Charles] Kean's Othello. She thinks she would not like Fechter's; his Iago must be like her father's (347, 247, 249, 245). Sarah Bernhardt's portrayal of Lady Macbeth recalled Mrs. Siddons' notion of her as a small delicate fair blue-eyed woman (187). The letters refer constantly to her family and friends and to contemporary artists, actors, writers, preachers and politicians, among them Joanne Baillie (223), Ann Bradshaw (247), Emily Brontë (353), John Gibson, William Godwin (387), Nathaniel Hawthorne (381), Harriet Hosmer, Henry James, Charles Kingsley (387-389), Frederic Leighton, Longfellow (413), Macaulay, F. D. Maurice (393), Mendelssohn, Theodore Parker, Adelaide Procter (415) and Shelley (363). Also, a letter to Fanny Kemble from Frances P. Cobbe, July 8, [1875] (19b), a letter to Frances Cobbe from Fanny Kemble's maid, Eleanor Brianzoni, January 19, 1898, telling her of Fanny Kemble's death (457), a poem on Venice by Fanny Kemble, ca. 1861 (453) and several photographs and illustrations. Poem listed in Folger index of first lines. The fragments of her journals, 1831-1832, ca. 1840 and ca. 1850, include an anecdote about Mrs. Siddons and Richard Sheridan (435), musings on Lawrence's drawings of the Kemble family (449), a description of her feelings on seeing an actress on her first night (441) and a discussion of The tempest and A midsummer night's dream (439).
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