Fanny Kemble

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Standard Name: Kemble, Fanny
Birth Name: Frances Anne Kemble
Married Name: Frances Anne Butler
FK was a prolific nineteenth-century writer best known for her journals, which covered her life in the theatre and her residence in the American south. Her first-hand documentation of the institution of slavery was particularly controversial. Apart from her journals she experimented with drama, poetry, and autobiography, and—late in life—wrote her very first and only novel.
Black and white photograph of a painting of Fanny Kemble by Sir Thomas Lawrence, She is seated in a chair draped with a fur-trimmed blanket, with a column visible in the background. She is wearing a white gown, low on her shoulders, with wasp waist, puffed sleeves, and ruffled trim. Her dark, shining hair, smooth and middle-parted, is pulled back in a bun.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Friends, Associates Catharine Maria Sedgwick
Closest to CMS were her siblings and their spouses, several of whom were also published authors. The Sedgwick family and Fanny Kemble were apparently the inner circle of the literary scene in the Berkshires,...
Friends, Associates Henry James
HJ 's circle of acquaintance in the world of letters and the theatre was very wide. As well as men of letters such as Edmund Gosse , it included a great many women writers, among...
Friends, Associates Barbarina Brand Baroness Dacre
BBBD 's circle of friends at this period of her life, many of them entertained by herself and her husband at the Hoo but many whose relationship with her went back to long before her...
Friends, Associates Adelaide Procter
AP 's parents entertained a circle of well-known literary personages, including Leigh Hunt , William Hazlitt , Thomas Moore , Wordsworth , Tennyson , Longfellow , and Henry James . Intimates of the household included...
Friends, Associates Eliza Lynn Linton
While in Paris, she met Madame von Mohl (wife of Orientalist Julius von Mohl , Chair of Persian at the Collège de France ); William Rathbone Greg ; Fanny Kemble ; Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning
Friends, Associates Maria Callcott
Her friends at this period of her life included the diarist and letter-writer Caroline Fox (with whom her relationship was very close),
This is the Hon. Caroline Fox (1767-1845), not to be confused with the...
Friends, Associates Edward FitzGerald
Despite a somewhat reclusive life both before and after his separation from his wife within a year of their marriage, he was well connected with the Victorian literary scene, and expressed strong opinions on women...
Friends, Associates Harriet Martineau
HM 's social circle vastly expanded at this time until she knew virtually all the prominent people, particularly the political men, of her day. As she recorded in her Autobiography, however, she refused to...
Friends, Associates Caroline Norton
Before her marriage CN had formed a friendship with the Irish poet Tom Moore , once a crony of her famous grandfather; this friendship endured into her middle age. It was also as Richard Brinsley...
Friends, Associates Frances Power Cobbe
Sometime in the later 1840s or early 1850s FPC gave a lunch party for her neighbour Harriet St Leger , and a friend of St Leger's, Fanny Kemble . Although the lunch went poorly, Kemble...
Intertextuality and Influence Emily Faithfull
The novel brings together the fashionable upper-class society which EF had experienced in her youth, with the question of women's employment which was the burning issue of her working life. She acknowledges the work of...
Literary responses Caroline Norton
Fanny Kemble , whose stage career was nearly two years old, found the play an effective tear-jerker, although it abounded in atrocious situations.
qtd. in
Chedzoy, Alan. A Scandalous Woman: The Story of Caroline Norton. Allison and Busby, 1995.
78
The Times saw merit in it of a distinguished kind.
Atkinson, Diane. The Criminal Conversation of Mrs Norton. Preface Publishing, 2012.
78
Literary responses Elizabeth Sewell
Her autobiography has received the most recent critical attention of her writings. Critic Valerie Sanders compares it with other autobiographies (by Harriet Martineau , Fanny Kemble and Margaret Oliphant ), and notes ES 's conflicted...
Literary responses Barbarina Brand Baroness Dacre
Fanny Kemble wrote: Her English version of Petrarch's sonnets . . . seem to me as nearly perfect as that species of literature can be.
Kemble, Fanny. Records of a Girlhood. Henry Holt, 1879.
346
Robert Percy Smith wrote: I really know of no...
Literary responses Charlotte Brontë
Harriet Martineau , finding the work attributed to herself even by members of her own family, felt that the unknown author must know not only my books but myself very well. . . . With...

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