Fanny Kemble: A Performed Life (review)

Deirdre David’s book is the fifteenth biographical study of the great nineteenth-century actress Fanny Kemble. It comes hard on the heels of Rebecca Jenkins’ critically acclaimed Fanny Kemble: The Reluctant Celebrity (2005). So the first question to ask is ‘do we need another biography of Fanny Kemble so soon?’, to which the answer must be a resounding ‘yes’. For one thing, where Jenkins ended her book with the break-up of Fanny’s marriage in the 1840s, David takes the story through to her death in 1893. For another thing – and more importantly – David advances and defends a fascinating interpretation of her subject, flagged up in her subtitle ‘a performed life’. She interprets the life both on and off the stage as being constructed according to the principles of the drama, an interpretation which derives much support from Fanny’s several volumes of autobiography which David assiduously mines for evidence. This reading is both valid and convincing, given evidence from the lives of other great actors. When Joan Plowright, Lady Olivier, was asked once how she could tell when her husband, Sir Laurence, was acting and when he was not acting, she replied: ‘He’s always acting’ and various biographers have noted Olivier’s construction of a series of personae for use when not on stage. Similarly commentators on and contemporaries of Sir Henry Irving argued that he had constructed an off-stage persona for himself to complement his onstage performances and to dignify his profession.

In some respects, Fanny Kemble (1809–93) was typical of stage performers in the first half of the nineteenth century. She came from a celebrated acting dynasty, her uncle John Philip Kemble, her aunt Sarah Siddons and her father Charles Kemble being major stars of the British stage. But she was all too conscious of the way in which the stage was looked down on by large sections of society, notably the Church, as morally and intellectually inferior. She therefore went on the stage with great reluctance – hence the subtitle of Rebecca Jenkins’ biography – and only when the family finances had been ruined by the cost of running the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden and a new Kemble star was needed to replenish the coffers. She had wanted to make a more ‘respectable’ career as poet and writer and actually had a play of hers, Francis the First, produced but it came and went quickly and did not suggest a major new playwriting talent. She seems, however, to have inherited the Kembles’ acting gene. She claims to have excelled in tragedy rather than comedy and she achieved success in what were then the staple roles for the young tragic actress: Juliet in Romeo and Juliet, Belvidera in Thomas Otway’s Venice Preserv’d, Julia in Sheridan Knowles’ The Hunchback and Bianca in Henry Milman’s Fazio. Although opinions about her acting varied, she inspired devotion in such fans as Arthur Hallam, the subject of Tennyson’s In Memoriam, the minor man of letters Richard Monckton-Milne and the major man of letters Henry James.

She eventually gave up stage acting in the 1850s for the more respectable practice of public Shakespeare readings, in which she vocally enacted all the parts. Her range was much admired and her Falstaff, for instance, attracted considerable praise. She followed this career for twenty years. In undertaking such readings, she would be followed by other distinguished retired actresses such as Helena Faucit and Ellen Terry. They could be seen as cultural missionaries, bringing the literary glories of England’s greatest poet to the mass audience, while avoiding the moral taint of stage performance.

Fanny’s reluctance to embark on a stage career was far from unique. The greatest actor of the first half of the nineteenth century, William Charles Macready, was continually troubled by the career that he had been forced into by his family’s financial reverses and he retired without any apparent regret as soon as he...