Frances Anne Kemble (1809-1893) was a famous London-born actress who toured the United States with her father for several years before marrying the Philadelphia landowner and heir Pierce Butler. Her two-volume journal, first published in 1835 under her married name, shocked the American public for its ungenerous and often biting criticisms of the young country. Detailing Kemble's voyage to and tour of the United States, the journal contains first hand accounts of the cities of the eastern seaboard in the early nineteenth-century and the manners and customs of its people. Noted for its candid observations and strong personal style, Kemble's journal remains one of her most lasting literary works.
Frances Anne Kemble (1809-93) was a famous London-born actress who toured the United States with her father for several years before marrying the Philadelphia landowner and heir Pierce Butler. Her two-volume journal, first published in 1835 under her married name, shocked the American public for its ungenerous and often biting criticisms of the young country. Detailing Kemble's voyage to and tour of the United States, the journal contains first hand accounts of the cities of the eastern seaboard in the early nineteenth-century and the manners and customs of its people. Noted for its candid observations and strong personal style, Kemble's journal remains one of her most lasting literary works.
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 21, 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.
Fanny Kemble was one of the leading lights of the English theater in the nineteenth century. During a triumphant tour of America, she met and married a wealthy Philadelphian, Pierce Butler, part of whose fortune derived from his family’s vast cotton and rice plantation on the Sea Islands of Georgia. After their marriage, she spent several months (December 1838 to April 1839) living on the plantation. Profoundly shocked by what she saw, she recorded her observations of plantation life in a series of journal entries written as letters to a friend. But she never sent the letters, and it was not until the Civil War was on and Fanny was divorced from her husband and living in England, were they published. She is a reporter par excellence and records in vivid detail not just her own reactions, but the day-to-day operations of the estate as a business enterprise, the lives of the several “classes” of Negro slaves and their white masters, and the plantation’s landscape of swamps and woods, canals and rivers, stately houses and decrepit hovels. Her account is filled with drama: duels, deaths, jealousies, and episodes of humor and tenderness which lighten the gloom but also accentuate the sadness of a world of toil and misery.
Marli Weiner challenges much of the received wisdom on the domestic realm of the nineteenth-century southern plantation--a world in which white mistresses and female slaves labored together to provide food, clothing, and medicines to the larger plantation community. Although divided by race, black and white women were joined by common female experiences and expectations of behavior. Because work and gender affected them as much as race, mistresses and female slaves interacted with one another very differently from the ways they interacted with men. Supported by the women's own words, Weiner offers fresh interpretations of the ideology of domesticity that influenced women's race relations before the Civil War, the gradual manner in which they changed during the war, and the harsher behaviors that resulted during Reconstruction. A volume in the series Women in American History, edited by Anne Firor Scott, Nancy A. Hewitt, and Stephanie Shaw
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