Adelaide Kemble

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After her mid-nineteenth-century career as an opera singer ended at her marriage, AK published a novel and a collection of stories. She left for posthumous publication another incomplete novel, two biographical memoirs, and some poetry. She also wrote letters, diaries, and many unpublished or uncollected songs.
  • BirthName: Adelaide Kemble
    AK sang under her birth name, though she did not write under it.

  • Married: Sartoris
  • Indexed: A. Sartoris
    AK used her initial and married surname for her first publication.
Photograph of a painting of Adelaide Kemble, painted with loose brushstrokes that give the painting the impression of softness. She is shown from the shoulders up, wearing a soft pink dress and holding flowers of a similar shade. She has a light, gauzy bonnet or scarf atop her dark, curly hair, which is pulled up and appears to be tied underneath the bonnet.

Milestones

6 November 1815

AK was born at Covent Garden Chambers in London, the youngest of five children (one of whom died young).
Older reference sources mostly give a wrong year for her birth.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.

By 27 July 1867

AK published, under her married name of A. Sartoris, her best-known work, the novel A Week in a French Country-House.
Athenæum. J. Lection.
2074 (1867): 113

4 August 1879

AK died at Warsash House in the village of Warsash, at the mouth of the Hamble River in Hampshire, a property of the Sartoris family which was demolished during the twentieth century.
Stephen, Sir Leslie, and Sidney Lee, editors. The Dictionary of National Biography. Smith, Elder, 1908–2025, 22 vols. plus supplements.
Marshall, Dorothy. Fanny Kemble. Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1977.
262

1880

The year after AK 's death her daughter, May E. Gordon , put out two volumes by her mother entitled Past Hours: these reprint the contents of Medusa, and Other Tales, with significant additions.
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.

Biography

Birth and Family

6 November 1815

AK was born at Covent Garden Chambers in London, the youngest of five children (one of whom died young).
Older reference sources mostly give a wrong year for her birth.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.

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