Kemble, Fanny, 1809-1893

In 1834, Kemble married a wealthy Philadelphian, Pierce Mease Butler, grandson of U.S. Senator Pierce Butler, whom she had met on an American acting tour with her father in 1832. After living in Philadelphia for a time, Butler became heir to the cotton, tobacco and rice plantations of his grandfather on Butler Island, just south of Darien, Georgia, and to the hundreds of slaves who worked them. He made trips to the plantations during the early years of their marriage, but never took Kemble or their children with him. At Kemble's insistence, they finally spent the winter of 1838–1839 there and Kemble kept a diary of her observations, flavored strongly by abolitionist sentiment.

Butler disapproved of Kemble's outspokenness, forbidding her to publish. The relationship grew abusive, and Kemble eventually returned to England with her two daughters. Butler filed for a divorce in 1847, after they had been separated for some time, citing abandonment and misdeed by Kemble. She returned to the theatre and toured major US cities, giving successful readings of Shakespeare plays. Her memoir circulated in American abolitionist circles, but she waited until 1863, during the American Civil War, to publish her anti-slavery Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838–1839. It has become her best-known work in the United States: she published several other volumes of journals. In 1877, she returned to England with her second daughter and son-in-law. She lived in London and was active in society, befriending the writer Henry James. In 2000, Harvard University Press published an edited compilation from her journals. These included Record of a Girlhood (1878) and Records of Later Life (1882).

A member of the famous Kemble theatrical family, Fanny was the eldest daughter of the actor Charles Kemble and his Viennese-born wife, the former Marie Therese De Camp. She was a niece of the noted tragedienne Sarah Siddons and of the famous actor John Philip Kemble. Her younger sister was the opera singer Adelaide Kemble. Fanny was born in London and educated chiefly in France. In 1821, Fanny Kemble departed to boarding school in Paris to study art and music as befitted the child of the most celebrated artistic family in England at that time. In addition to literature and society, it was at Mrs Lamb's Academy in the Rue d'Angoulême, Champs Elysées, that Fanny received her first real personal exposure to the stage performing staged readings for students' parents during her time at school. As an adolescent, Kemble spent time studying literature and poetry, in particular the work of Lord Byron.

One of her teachers was Frances Arabella Rowden (1774 – c. 1840), who had been associated with the Reading Abbey Girls' School since she was 16. Rowden was an engaging teacher, with a particular enthusiasm for the theatre. She was not only a poet, but according to Mary Russell Mitford, "she had a knack of making poetesses of her pupils"

In 1827, Kemble wrote her first five-act play, Francis the First. It was met with critical acclaim from multiple quarters. Nineteenth-century critics wrote that the script "displays so much spirit and originality, so much of the true qualities which are required in dramatic composition, that it may fairly stand upon its own intrinsic worth, and that the author may fearlessly challenge a comparison with any other modern dramatist."

On 26 October 1829, at the age of 20, Kemble first appeared on the stage as Juliet in Romeo and Juliet at Covent Garden Theatre, after only three weeks of rehearsals. Her attractive personality at once made her a great favourite, and her popularity enabled her father to recoup his losses as a manager. She played all the principal women's roles of the time, notably Shakespeare's Portia and Beatrice (Much Ado about Nothing), and Lady Teazle in Richard Brinsley Sheridan's The School for Scandal. Kemble disliked the artificiality of stardom in general, but appreciated the salary which she accepted to help her family in their frequent financial troubles.

In 1832, Kemble accompanied her father on a theatrical tour of the United States. While in Boston in 1833, she journeyed to Quincy to witness the revolutionary technology of the first commercial railroad in the United States. She had previously accompanied George Stephenson on a test of the Liverpool and Manchester, prior to its opening in England, and described this in a letter written in early 1830. The Granite Railway was among many sights which she recorded in her journal.

Kemble returned to acting as a solo platform performer, beginning her first American tour in 1849. During her readings she rose to focus on presenting edited works of Shakespeare, though unlike others she insisted on representing his entire canon, ultimately building her repertoire to 25 of his plays. She performed in Britain and in the United States, concluding her career as a platform performer in 1868.

On June 7, 1834, Kemble retired from the stage to marry Pierce Mease Butler. Although they met and lived in Philadelphia, Pierce's mother was a daughter of Pierce Butler, a Founding Father who represented South Carolina at the Constitutional Convention. By agreeing to change his last name from Mease to Butler - as his grandfather's will had demanded, Pierce had become the heir to a large fortune in cotton, tobacco, and rice plantations. By the time the couple's daughters, Sarah and Frances, were born, Butler had inherited three of his grandfather's plantations on Butler Island, just south of Darien, Georgia, and the hundreds of people who were enslaved on them.

The family visited Georgia during the winter of 1838–1839, where they lived at the plantations at Butler and St. Simons islands, in conditions primitive compared to their house in Philadelphia. Kemble was shocked by the living and working conditions of the slaves and their treatment by the overseers and managers. She tried to improve matters, complaining to her husband about slavery and about the mixed-race slave children attributed to the overseer, Roswell King, Jr.

Marital tensions had emerged when the family returned to Philadelphia in the spring of 1839. Apart from their disagreements over slave treatment on Butler's plantations, Kemble was "embittered and embarrassed" by Butler's marital infidelities. Butler threatened to deny Kemble access to their daughters if she published any of her observations about the plantations. By 1845–1847, the marriage had failed irretrievably and Kemble returned to Europe.

In 1847, Kemble returned to the stage in the United States, as she needed to make a living. Following her father's example, she appeared with success as a Shakespearean reader, rather than acting in plays. She toured the United States. The couple endured a bitter and protracted divorce in 1849, with Butler retaining custody of their two daughters. At that time, with divorce rare, the father was customarily awarded custody in the patriarchal society. Other than brief visits, Kemble was not reunited with her daughters until each came of age at 21.

Her ex-husband squandered a fortune estimated at $700,000, but was saved from bankruptcy by a sale on 2–3 March 1859 of 436 people he held in slavery. The Great Slave Auction, at Ten Broeck racetrack outside Savannah, Georgia, was the largest single slave auction in United States history. As such, it was covered by national reporters.

After the American Civil War, Butler tried to run his plantations with free labour, but failed to make a profit. He died of malaria in Georgia in 1867. Neither Butler nor Kemble remarried.

Kemble's success as a Shakespearean reader enabled her to buy a home in Lenox, Massachusetts. In 1877, she returned to London to join her younger daughter Frances, who had moved there with her British husband and child. Using her maiden name, Kemble lived there until her death. During this period she was a prominent and popular figure in London society, and became a great friend of the American writer Henry James during her later years. His novel, Washington Square (1880), was based on a story Kemble told him about one of her relatives.