Suddenly, a Fanny Kemble Bandwagon

If Wendy Robie and several others have their way, Fanny Kemble, one of the most famous and remarkable women of the 19th century, will shed her relative obscurity at the dawn of the 21st.

Robie has a grass-roots approach to spreading Kemble’s story, taking her one-woman play, “The Emancipation of Fanny Kemble,” to college campuses and small theaters around the nation. Cable TV audiences will get a version of the Kemble saga next year when Showtime presents “Enslavement: The True Life Story of Fanny Kemble,” starring Jane Seymour as the actress-writer and Keith Carradine as Pierce Butler, the husband who became her bitter foe in a marriage torn by his ownership of slaves and suppression of her journal of life on a Georgia plantation.

On a more scholarly plane, Catherine Clinton, a former Harvard professor, is readying a biography, “Fanny Kemble’s Civil Wars” (Simon & Schuster) and has edited “Fanny Kemble’s Journals” (Harvard University Press), which excerpts the writings of the actress-abolitionist. Both will be published next year.

Kemble, the niece of famed actress Sarah Siddons, preferred writing to acting but became a star out of necessity to save the fortunes of her theatrical family, which went broke operating the Covent Garden theater. Her first role, the lead in “Romeo and Juliet,” made her an instant sensation in England.

“When she hits the shores in the United States, she is like Lady Di hitting America in the 1980s,” Clinton said in a phone interview from her home in Connecticut. “People had Fanny Kemble hats, Fanny Kemble curls. A Harvard professor said, ‘We’re going to have to cancel our classes if Fanny Kemble is performing, because all the young men go to her performances and swoon.’ ”

In 1835, Kemble became a bestselling author with “Journal of America,” a memoir of her travels as a touring stage star.

“In England, Princess Victoria read it and was disapproving of Fanny Kemble’s blunt language,” Clinton said. “She was not a proper Victorian girl. She was free-spirited and said what she thought and was a real international celebrity in the 1830s.”

Kemble married one of her many suitors, Pierce Butler, who subsequently inherited Georgia plantations that Kemble, an abolitionist, insisted on seeing firsthand.

“He thought she would see that slaves were inferior, backward, filthy and unhygienic, and that his pampered British wife would be horrified by them,” Clinton said. “She was, but instead of turning her back on them, she started a hospital, made clothes and was completely devoted to bettering the lives of these people.”

Kemble published “Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation” in 1863, when she feared England might recognize the Confederacy. For years, it had circulated privately in abolitionist circles; Kemble feared that publishing it would infuriate her husband, lead to a divorce and cost her any contact with her two daughters. As it was, Kemble was virtually ostracized from her own home, until she and Butler divorced in 1849.

Her journal was a sensation in England, but Clinton said Kemble fans who claim that it was a primary reason that Great Britain refused to recognize the Confederacy--which could have boosted the Southern economy and war effort--are greatly exaggerated. Today, the journal is considered an important historical document.

“I think that she did a pretty good job of describing what [slavery] was like,” said professor Gary W. Gallagher, a Civil War expert at the University of Virginia. “Most historians would say that is one of the most important titles in antislavery literature.”

Said Clinton: “It’s the first time we have very blunt, honest, searing analysis of slavery’s realities. She said in her journal, ‘I’m not going to embellish their stories. This is the unvarnished truth.’ The journal was so revolutionary because it gave African American women voices, and their voices were indictments of slavery.

“[Kemble] was going behind the scenes and telling all the dirt. Butler was held up as someone who was especially good to his slaves. But she was so debilitated by what she felt were the horrors of what she witnessed that her journal is also a chronicle of the disintegration of her marriage.

“You can pick up her journal and say, ‘This would make a great play,’ ” Clinton said, noting that over the past 30 years she has become aware of several one-woman shows about Kemble, though none of them have become standard repertory works. “I think it’s wonderful that everyone can adapt her. There’s a whole generation of people who don’t know her.”