Frances Anne Kemble was born into a theatrical family: she was the niece of John Philip Kemble, the actor-manager of Drury Lane, and the actress Mrs. Sarah Kemble Siddons and the daughter of Charles Kemble, actor-proprietor of Covent Garden. Her mother, the actress Marie Theresa De Camp Kemble, wishing to fit her for a higher milieu than the stage, had her educated in France. From childhood Fanny wrote compulsively, and at sixteen she completed Francis the First (1832), a verse-tragedy the actor William Charles Macready found "full of power, poetry and pathos." Its reception by audiences, however, was lukewarm. In 1829 her mother persuaded her to play in Romeo and Juliet in a bid to stave off the impending bankruptcy of her father's theater. Stubby figure, pock-marked countenance, and stage fright notwithstanding, her Juliet became the talk of London. Her admirers included Sir Walter Scott, Samuel Rogers, and the painter Sir Thomas Lawrence, whose sketch of her became well known.
Her father took her to America for the 1832-1833 season; Harvard students idolized her and girls wore Fanny Kemble curls. At Philadelphia she and Pierce Butler, heir to a Georgia plantation, fell in love; they were married early in 1834. They had two daughters: Sarah, born in 1835, and Frances, born in 1838. Although she retired thankfully from the stage, her marriage soon proved to have been a tragic error. An unwilling immigrant, she yearned for the social and intellectual life she had known in London. Against her husband's wishes she had a journal published in 1835 that gave widespread offense by its criticism of American life and manners. A devout Evangelical, she openly sympathized with the abolitionist cause. Hoping that experience might change her views, her husband took her to Butler Island, Georgia, for the winter of 1838-1839. This time her journal remained unpublished until 1863, but her horror at the conditions and treatment of the slaves and her energetic but tactless efforts on their behalf infuriated her husband, who was a relatively humane slaveholder. They became more estranged after they returned to England in 1840 to be with her father, who was gravely ill. She and her sister Adelaide ("Totty"), a prima donna, were feted in London and in country mansions while her mediocre husband passed unnoticed. After their return to the United States in 1843 she refused Butler's demand that she abandon her closest American friends and finally left him for good, after thrice being persuaded by him to return during 1842 and 1843. The separation took place in 1844 but the deed was not signed until March 1845. Butler's conditions were so harsh that Fanny had to borrow her fare to England in the fall. A friend remarked that "Whichever side of the ocean she sojourned, she was homesick for the other." In December 1845 she and her father had their passages booked for America. When he changed his mind, she traveled to Rome to join her sister. Though her idyllic visions of Italian life were soon dispelled by the squalid living conditions of the people, she remained there until December 1846, when she resumed her acting career in the hope of saving up her fare to America to see her children. Her husband decided in 1847 to sue for divorce, citing her acting as ground. The real reasons, however, were her refusal to subordinate herself to him and tolerate his extramarital love affairs. The uncontested suit dragged on until November 1849, when a Philadelphia court granted the divorce. Even more painful than the much-publicized lawsuit was Fanny's separation from her daughters until they came of age.
In 1844, to buy back her horse, which her husband had sold, Kemble had a book published containing about 100 of her lyrics and sonnets. Several of these voice an earlier unrequited passion for a fellow actor; a number express her love for Butler; rather more of them indicate her religious love of nature. The most numerous and most powerful reveal her bitter disappointment at the failure of her marriage. While "Prayer of a Lonely Heart" best expresses her frustrated longing for love, "To--" ("The fountain of my life") develops most completely her recurrent image of life as a spring or river. Her favorite and most self-revealing motifs are the tempestuous sea and the storm-clouded landscape. In her weltschmerz she follows her beloved Byron, but her intonation recalls that of Mrs. Browning, who thought her "inelastic ... unpliant to her age." One of the sonnets from her 1844 volume is representative of her work:
There's not a fibre in my trembling frame
That does not vibrate when thy step draws near,
There's not a pulse that throbs not when I hear
Thy voice, thy breathing, nay, thy very name.
When thou art with me, every sense seems dull,
And all I am, or know, or feel, is thee;
My soul grows faint, my veins run liquid flame,
And my bewildered spirit seems to swim
In eddying whirls of passion, dizzily.
When thou art gone, there creeps into my heart
A cold and bitter consciousness of pain:
The light, the warmth of life, with thee depart,
And I sit dreaming o'er and o'er again
Thy greeting clasp, thy parting look, and tone;
And suddenly I wake--and am alone.
Though she dismissed her poems as "trumpery," they attracted reviews in the Athenaeum and Quarterly Review. Henry James, who became a friend in her old age, thought them underrated, being "all passionate and melancholy ... perfectly individual and ... lyrical."
For the two years before her divorce, Kemble had supported herself by acting in major English cities. Her acting career came to an end in 1848 following continual disagreements with Macready, who favored a naturalistic style of playing Shakespeare as against her concentration on bringing out the sounds and rhythms of the verse. By this time she had come to despise the theater, and turned to those solo readings of the entire Shakespeare corpus that earned her lasting prosperity and esteem. At first these readings were given in British cities to patrons still too dominated by Evangelicalism to approve of acting, but from the fall of 1848 they were mainly presented in America. Although her readings earned her a fortune during the next twenty years, she gave many performances for charity and never allowed her managers to overcharge for admission. Her lifelong admirer and obituarist Henry Lee attributed the success of her readings to her range and quality of voice, grace of gesture, "mobility and eloquence" of face, and, above all, her "comprehensive intelligence and deep feeling" for Shakespeare, "whose priestess she was." Longfellow wrote a sonnet about her readings. Her earnings enabled her to purchase York Farm near Lenox, Massachusetts, and to spend her summers in the Swiss Alps.
Before her final return to England in 1877, her reminiscences were published in the Atlantic Monthly. Even in her seventies she wrote a comedy and a historical novel and enjoyed the admiring friendship of Robert Browning, Edward Fitz-Gerald, and Henry James.
In 1859 she had her poems republished, adding a further sixty-eight, many of which had been written during the year in Italy (1845-1846), described in A Year of Consolation (1847). Her publisher brought out a revised edition in 1883, replacing many of the 1844 poems with twenty-five new ones. Most of the new poems were on her old theme of disappointed love, now viewed less darkly. Three poetic expressions of her ardor for the Northern cause in the Civil War were much admired at that time. For all its intense and genuine feeling, her verse suffers from a lack of dedication, rather than of talent, evident in her refusal to undertake revisions or corrections for the 1883 edition. Their prolixity and pseudoromantic jargon stamp most, though not all, of her poems as "minor-Victorian."
In her latter years, she depended increasingly upon her servants for the leisure that made possible her incessant writing and other activities. Most of all she treasured her English maid Ellen, who was with her from 1870 and who married Kemble's Italian manservant, Luigi Brianzone, in 1877. Kemble's generosity to her servants caused even the good-natured Sarah to wonder whether her mother was being exploited in her declining years. Any suspicions of this kind should surely be laid to rest by the tenderness and pathos with which Ellen described the death of the "dear mistress" who "passed away peacefully" in her arms while being put to bed. She was buried at Kensal Green cemetery near London.
Fanny Kemble deserves best to be remembered for the freshness and candor of her journal-writing; for her generous, independent, and humane spirit; and supremely for her interpretations of Shakespeare. It is a great misfortune that she lived too early for the latter to be recorded.
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