Fanny Kemble continues to fascinate modern audiences more than a hundred years after her death. Her life experiences were so varied and colorful, extending from the Regency through the Victorian period, from England to America and Europe, and encompassing theatrical, literary, and political society, that there is plenty of material for the four books that have been published about her since 2000. The best of these, in terms of a general biography, is Deirdre David's Fanny Kemble: A Performed Life, under review here, but each of the others sheds light on different aspects of her life, and it is worth saying something briefly about their scope first.
Catherine Clinton's Fanny Kemble's Civil War (Simon & Schuster, 2000) focuses on Kemble's turbulent marriage to Pierce Butler in the context of her deep antislavery sentiments, her reactions to what she saw on Butler's plantations, and the Civil War itself. Ann Blainey's book Fanny & Adelaide: The Lives of the Remarkable Kemble Sisters (Ivan R. Dee, 2001) is a double biography focusing on the lives of Fanny and her sister, Adelaide Kemble Sartoris, a noted opera singer. Blainey was fortunate to draw on a large cache of letters from Adelaide that have been in the Kemble family and were not previously used by another biographer. Finally, Fanny Kemble, the Reluctant Celebrity by Rebecca Jenkins (Simon & Schuster, 2005) is a popular biography that focuses mainly on her theatrical life. It spends more time on the background of Kemble's family in the theatre and on her early life, and ends rather abruptly with her experiences in Georgia and her separation from her husband. Deirdre David cites all three books in her bibliography, but her canvas is both broader and more complex.
David comes to Kemble's story as a Victorianist and a feminist, not as a theatre historian, but she by no means ignores the theatrical and in fact sees it as a formative element throughout Kemble's life. Indeed, her subtitle, “a Performed Life,” provides an important key to the way she approaches Kemble. David sees her as creating a “role” for herself as a reluctant performer in her multivolume autobiography, her letters, and essays. While the genre of theatrical biography was based on the novel, David points out that Kemble presents her own life more like a play, setting the scenes and having the actors come on and off (xvi). Throughout her life, Kemble felt a sense of “moral disdain” (xiii) for the theatre, even though she was also attracted by it and indeed constructed her own life as a performance.
David is good at placing the romantic story of Kemble's grooming for the stage and early success within the darker framework of her mother's neurotic temperament, the “emotional inertia” (47) of her famous aunt Sarah Siddons after retirement, as well as the scandalous life of her other aunt, Ann Kemble, who had a short stretch as a prostitute between an unsuccessful stint as actress in Graham's Temple of Health, and as songwriter in New York. David uses such background to indicate the precarious nature of acting in the period and the ambiguity that Kemble always felt about her own participation in such a profession.
David also reads Kemble's life from a feminist perspective, “alert to my subject's resistance to prescribed nineteenth-century codes for women's lives” (xiv). All her life Kemble fought a tendency toward severe depression inherited from her mother. David is sensitive throughout to Kemble's depressive periods and the ways in which she attempted to control them. She has used an important source—Kemble's own annotated copy of John Barlow's published lecture “On Man's Power over Himself to Prevent or Control Insanity”—which I have not seen cited by other biographers. David shows how Kemble tried to control her morbid sensibilities and stage fright through physical exercise such as horseback riding, and through the routines she set up before performance.
David also sensitively explores Kemble's intense relationships with other women, especially Harriet St. Leger, but also her cousin Harriet Kemble, and the American novelist Catharine Maria Sedgwick. Comparing her with fellow actress and lesbian Charlotte Cushman, David notes that Kemble showed strong feelings toward both women and men. She was sexually attracted to the man who became her husband, Pierce Butler, and also quite taken by the older writer Edward Trelawny. But she had a lifelong passion for Harriet St. Leger, member of an Anglo-Irish family, who was thirty when the seventeen-year-old Kemble first met her. Upon Harriet's death, the thousands of letters which Kemble wrote to her were returned, and became the basis for Kemble's autobiographical volumes, published late in her life.
David recounts with understanding Kemble's financial plight when she separated from Butler and returned to England in 1845. What she needed was financial independence, a situation not available to women until the Married Women's Property Act in 1870 made it legal for women to own money earned by themselves or inherited. She did a little writing and reviewing to make ends meet, then became dependent on the kindness of relatives and friends, staying for a time with her sister in Italy.
David is especially good at re-creating the social, economic, and political contexts for the various episodes of Kemble's life. For example, on an 1830 acting tour through the north of England with her father, Kemble encountered the unrest of the poorer working classes for the first time, helping to put a face of reality on what she had only heard discussed among her friends. As she experienced the thrill of riding on one of the earliest trains, she also became aware of the Manchester mill workers demonstrating at the station against industrialization. These encounters were only mild preparation, however, for the conditions of the slaves she would see on her husband's plantation in Georgia. David brilliantly evokes the emotional disjunction between this cultured, enlightened Englishwoman and the slaveholding society into which she was thrust in her role as mistress of her husband's plantation. Kemble was horrified, particularly by the condition of the slave women who came to her with their sorrows and for whom she pleaded with her husband, an action that only exacerbated the growing rift between them.
She coped with her terrible circumstances by writing a diary, later published as Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation, and by exploring the natural beauty of the islands. David shows how in her writing, Kemble “creates a tableau in which the placement of the furniture, the lighting, and the movement of the actors are carefully arranged” (158). The slaves would come in and squat on the floor, watching her write and looking in wonder at her environment. Kemble refers to this as “the Calibanish wonderment of all my visitors.” Drawing on the work of Alison Booth, David elaborates on the influence of The Tempest on Kemble throughout her life: “for many years she had wistfully imagined herself as Miranda to her father's Prospero,” now “she cast herself as a kind of female Prospero performing magic writing before enslaved ‘Calibanish’ dependents” (156).
After the long-drawn-out separation and before the final divorce, we see how Kemble's new “master” was Shakespeare himself. Now, as a woman on her own, she returned to the playwright who meant so much to her at the start of her career, and constructed a series of brilliant readings from his plays that she performed on both sides of the Atlantic to rhapsodic audiences. As David perceptively remarks: “Rather than performing as Kemble daughter and Kemble actress or, with considerably more resistance, assuming the roles of Butler wife and plantation mistress, she became a sovereign figure, subject to no authority but that dictated by the ‘master’” (223).
In the latter part of the book, David discusses Kemble's relationship with her daughters, Fan and Sarah, and with the friends of her later years, including Henry James. My only criticism of the book is the lack of better copy-editing, resulting in the inclusion of a number of typographical errors unusual for a publisher of this caliber, and unfortunate for such a piece of distinguished writing. David's book is a compelling read, notable for the combined theatrical, feminist, and social sensibilities of the author, which together create a new understanding of this fascinating English American woman.
