LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Fanny Kemble: Pierce Butler
built 644 days ago
Pierce Butler became infatuated with Fanny Kemble after seeing her perform. He followed her devotedly while she toured. He was charming, solicitous. Fanny fell in love with him, and they were married in 1834 in Philadelphia. In marrying Pierce, Fanny escaped the life of the theater and her family's precarious finances and entered a life of wealth. At that time, she would later state, she did not know the source of this wealth.
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As the terrible, wonderful year of 1848 began, with storms of liberty sweeping across Europe and the Chartists shaking the pillars of the British Establishment, Fanny was living at the epicenter, revelling in the excitement of history in the making. She had six weeks of solid bookings ahead of her, enough to pay for the trip to America and the cottage Catharine Sedgwick had found for her in Lenox. She was impatient to be there, to see—or at least to have fresh news of—her daughters. Friends who made inquiries about them could learn only that they were in boarding school. They advised Fanny to come and open a direct negotiation with Pierce for some sort of reasonable compromise.
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Frances Anne Kemble was born on November 27, 1809. The daughter of actor Charles Kemble and his actress wife Maria Theresa De Camp, she could claim full membership in the aristocracy of the British theater. By the time she traveled with her father to their New York opening in 1832, she was an established dramatic star. For two seasons Kemble and the company toured the United States, playing to wildly enthusiastic audiences. But in spite of her success, Kemble hated what she thought of as the artificiality of acting. She was happy to retire in 1834 to become the wife of Pierce Butler, heir to a rich Georgia plantation.
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In 1835 Kemble published the Journal of Frances Anne Butler, a record of her tour of the Atlantic states in 1832-1833. In 1838 she kept a journal while residing on the Georgia plantations owned by her husband. Although the Butler family pleaded with Kemble not to publish the accounts, she eventually did so in 1863. Her Journal of A Residence on A Georgian Plantation is an attempt to persuade her native England not to support the Confederacy. The journal makes a correlation between the gender-based oppression of slave women and her own subjugation in the legal and social systems of 19th-century United States.
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Kemble's marriage to Pierce Butler ended in disaster when she witnessed planatation life first hand. She simply could not tolerate her husband's treatment toward his workers. Though Butler forbid her to do so, Kemble kept highly detailed journals about the conditions of slavery on Butler’s plantation which she witnessed everyday of her married life. After the divorce, Kemble returned to the theatre supporting herself by doing Shakespearean readings.
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In 1834, Kemble retired from the stage and married a well-to-do Philadelphian, Pierce Butler. By 1838, they had two daughters and were settled into somewhat less than satisfactory domestic life. Butler resented Kemble's outspoken statements on the coarseness of American culture and her insistence on continuing to pursue a writing career. Kemble found the constraints of Philadelphia society stultifying and her own household responsibilities dispiriting. Then Butler inherited slave plantations in Georgia (properties which Kemble claimed not to have known about before the marriage) and plans were made for the whole family to visit the holdings at the mouth of the Altamaha River.
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Pierce Butler