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 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 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...
Friends, Associates Frances Power Cobbe
FPC also numbered Americans among her wide circle of friends. Louisa May Alcott recalled vividly how her assumption that FPC would be a serious, severe lady, of the Cornelia Blimber school was immediately banished on...
Friends, Associates Anna Brownell Jameson
ABJ met Fanny Kemble in 1828 and a friendship developed. Of this meeting Kemble later wrote: And so began a close and friendly intimacy, which lasted for many years, between myself and this very accomplished...
Friends, Associates Louisa Catherine Shore
During her stay in Fulham, LCS made some literary contacts, including Fanny Kemble and Sara Coleridge .
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.
Friends, Associates Mary Elizabeth Coleridge
Her parents often hosted musical and cultural events that drew visitors from London's artistic circles. As a girl, MEC would have seen Alfred Tennyson , John Ruskin , William Holman Hunt , Fanny Kemble ...
Friends, Associates Anna Brownell Jameson
Besides her time in the USA with Fanny Kemble , Catherine Sedgwick , and William Channing , ABJ made the acquaintance of Frederick Marryat , whose advice on publishing matters she appreciated.
Thomas, Clara. Love and Work Enough: The Life of Anna Jameson. University of Toronto Press, 1967.
117-25
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...
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 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...
Literary responses Isabel Hill
IH 's brother later wrote that The First of May would have received more favourable reviews had it been given a different slot in the benefit. He also wished to see it performed on nights...
Literary responses Georgiana Fullerton
Henry Fothergill Chorley , reviewing the novel for the Athenæum, found Grantley Manorhaunted by the intertextual spectre of Jane Austen 's Emma; he also drew parallels with Frances Burney 's Cecilia...

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