Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Very moving,Kemble takes us with her on a harrowing journey, 22 Nov 2001
By A Customer
Fanny Kemble (member of the first family of the British theatre) met her husband-to-be, Pierce Butler, during her time in America. They married soon after but it was a marrage that was doomed to fail.
Pierce inherited a Georgian Slave Plantation - something Kemble was passionately against! Spending time on the plantation only made Kemble more aware of the horrors that slaves had to endure. She made continual efforts to try and help them but the battle she was endlessly fighting seemed to be unwinnable.What Kemble was doing was frowned upon not only by society but also by her husband which made her efforts even more difficult.
Kemble writes of many heart-breaking events that she was powerless to stop, making us feel her sorrow and pain for an impossible situation.
This is a book that everyone should read not only because it is the work of a truly inspirational person but because it is an issue of which we should all be aware. Slavery still happens today, even more so than ever, and after reading this book the only question I am left with is... why?
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5.0 out of 5 stars
A superb and moving record, 28 Oct 2006
Published in 1863, this is a series of letters from Kemble to her friend E[lizabeth Sedgwick] describing her four months as the wife of a Georgian plantation owner, and going into considerable detail about the living conditions of the slaves. It is horrific stuff, an eloquent argument against slavery, published twenty-five years after the event in a deliberate attempt to undermine British sympathy for the Confederacy in the middle of the Civil War. I haven't read any of the editorials in the Times that she is reacting to, but I do remember the right-wing British press on apartheid, Northern Ireland, and (more dimly) Rhodesia. Sadly, I have little difficulty in imagining pompous British journalists of the day trying to reassure their readers that slavery was actually a very good deal for the slaves. (It is also a shameful fact, remembered by few, that Irish nationalists of the 1860s sympathised with the Confederacy too, as they sympathised with the Boers at the end of the century.)
Bearing in mind that the author was an actress, I was alert for clues that the letters might have been somewhat revised for publication to put her case in the best possible light. But I ended up doubting that this was the case - there are enough internal repetitions that a good editor would have taken out to ensure a better flow of the narrative. I am sure that she did delete certain more personal details about her husband and daughters, but I feel that otherwise this is pretty much the horrified account of a thirty-year-old woman trying (and ultimately failing) to come to terms with the society she had married into, rather then her fifty-five-year-old self retrospectively justifying it; a famous and glamorous English actress, who had married a rich and charming young American and only gradually come to a realisation of exactly how his family's fortunes were sustained.
The book confirms that slavery was every bit as awful as one might have thought, going into what one might call TMI about the female slaves' gynaecological problems (I'm frankly stunned that she was able to publish this kind of thing in the 1860s, in England or America) and other questions of diet, hygiene, education, religion, and (in one memorable passage) fleas:
"although on one or two occasions I have penetrated into fearfully foul and filthy abodes of misery in London, I have never rendered the same personal services to their inhabitants that I do to [my husband]'s slaves, and so have not incurred the same amount of entomological inconvenience."
That phrase, "entomological inconvenience", is just superb, isn't it? It pulls together the language of polite society and scientific discourse with the horrid squalor of the life of the poor, especially the enslaved. Thank heavens there were people like her prepared to bear witness to what it actually meant. There's much more here (and so little of it touched in the woeful Jenkins biography), all grimly fascinating.
One last thought. I find it difficult to sympathise with her husband; but one thing I did pick up between the lines of the biography was this. Fanny Kemble made her name as Juliet, and that is presumably who Pierce Butler thought he was marrying, as a Romeo from the other side of the Atlantic. But from her teenage years, her favourite Shakespeare character had been not Juliet, but Portia, who symbolised for Fanny the virtues of feminine assertiveness but also a thirst for justice and mercy. It is good that she got to live out her ideals; it is unfortunate that her husband does not seem to have bothered to inquire what they were before they married.
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by Keith Thomas
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