Fanny Kemble

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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.

Milestones

27 November 1809

FK was born in London during public riots (directed at her father) demanding a return to Old Prices in the theatre.
Clinton, Catherine. Fanny Kemble’s Civil Wars. Simon and Schuster.
24
Stephen, Sir Leslie, and Sidney Lee, editors. The Dictionary of National Biography. Smith, Elder.
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.
Marshall, Dorothy. Fanny Kemble. Weidenfeld and Nicholson.
6

May 1863

The Athenæum reviewed FK 's Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-1839 (with reflections on slavery), first published some twenty-five years after it was written.
Clinton, Catherine. Fanny Kemble’s Civil Wars. Simon and Schuster.
178-9
Athenæum. J. Lection.
1858 (1863): 737-9

By 8 June 1889

FK published Far Away and Long Ago, her first and only novel, at the age of eighty.
Clinton, Catherine. Fanny Kemble’s Civil Wars. Simon and Schuster.
258
Athenæum. J. Lection.
3215 (1889): 725

13 January 1893

FK died in London at the age of eighty-three.
Marshall, Dorothy. Fanny Kemble. Weidenfeld and Nicholson.
270

Biography

Birth and Background

27 November 1809

FK was born in London during public riots (directed at her father) demanding a return to Old Prices in the theatre.
Clinton, Catherine. Fanny Kemble’s Civil Wars. Simon and Schuster.
24
Stephen, Sir Leslie, and Sidney Lee, editors. The Dictionary of National Biography. Smith, Elder.
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.
Marshall, Dorothy. Fanny Kemble. Weidenfeld and Nicholson.
6

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