Fanny Kemble: A Performed Life (review)

Deirdre David's biography of Fanny Kemble is as vivid and many-sided as Kemble was herself. an actress who claimed to hate the stage, Kemble seems more a presence than a performer. Though her audiences loved her, I wonder whether she was an actress at all. unlike Henry Irving, Sarah Bernhardt, and Ellen Terry, who strutted and fretted until they could speak no more, Kemble fled acting as soon as she could.

She saw herself as a writer; her poetry is leaden, but her prose is pungent and angry and alive. Three volumes of her memoirs became bestsellers when she was in her seventies, though few of their avid readers could have seen her on the stage. Still, for all her expressiveness, this biography intimates that Kemble gave her greatest performances at parties. unlike most actors, she was a wit, an iconoclast and raconteur, whose charisma flared independently of her roles. The stage made her famous, but it inhibited her mind.

It is hard to get under the skin of this self-obsessed chameleon. David makes a valiant try, but her Fanny Kemble remains an opaque if galvanizing subject. Why did she do what she did? Did she really hate acting, or did she simply hate her parents?

Like most nineteenth-century actresses, Kemble was groomed by her theatrical family. In 1829, when she was nineteen, her father pushed her into Juliet as collateral against one of his recurrent financial crises. Juliet paid off: she was an acclaimed money-maker who, temporarily at least, kept Covent Garden Theater under Kemble control; but was Kemble's stellar debut a triumph or a concession to family improvidence? Did she associate acting with art or obedience? Was she even a good Juliet, or was she cheered automatically as the next generation of an illustrious stage family, not only the daughter of the popular Charles Kemble, but the niece of the hallowed Sarah Siddons? From our vantage point, though Kemble wrote reams about herself, it is impossible to know what her hated triumph meant to her and those who applauded her.

More inexplicably, this chafing Juliet went on to marry a man so brutally oppressive he could have played the villain in a feminist melodrama. No doubt she married Pierce Butler, an American slave owner, to escape her family and the theater, but why choose a role more imprisoning than anything she had played? Like most of her progressive British associates, Kemble was an abolitionist (England had abolished the slave trade in 1807), one given to feminist self-assertion; but as Mrs. Pierce Butler, her income was submerged in his, as she must have known it would be, and his was entirely dependent on slave labor on his three Georgia plantations. She found their Philadelphia home dreary and Georgia a savage nightmare. The indolent Pierce was so jealous of her fame that he not only barred her from performing but censored her writing, sanctioning no letters or manuscripts critical of slavery or himself. Like the slaves she owned, Kemble was wrenched into silent subservience.

David describes these years of bondage with harrowing vividness, but she is hazy about Kemble's motives. Did she want simply to escape the theater? Or did sexual attraction cloud her intelligence, leading her to ignore her inevitable financial dependence and the degradation of slavery (domestic and national)? Kemble's marriage was so dreadful, even by Victorian standards, that I suspect she married Butler so that she could leave him with feminist éclat. After eleven years and two daughters, she did. She returned to England transfigured by humiliation, a divorced woman, a pariah to some and a hero to many, and the author of scathing books about America.

Onstage, she swelled into an incarnation of Shakespeare. Kemble's Shakespeare readings were her most innovative performance. Too proud—and probably too old and massive—to play in anyone else's production, she staged readings of all the plays, playing all the parts, male as well as female. Her favorite...