Fanny Kemble, the new hope of one of London’s most important theatrical families, was at the height of her acting career when she retired to wed a Georgia planter, “the second largest slave owner in Georgia”, as Catherine Clinton ceaselessly repeats in her lucklaster and superficial biography of Kemble, Fanny Kemble’s Civil Wars. I am not sure why Oxford University press bothered with this book, which doesn’t really seem to add much to what is already a significant literature on the Kembles. I haven’t read other biographies of Fanny, but maybe the way in which this one differs is giving equal weight to the different phases of her life: playwright, actress, public lecturer, abolitionist author, social commentator, and so on.
One of the most irritating weaknesses Clinton shows is typical of biographies of actors. There is a tendency in writing about actors to assume that their unique gift came with a prise, usually madness. Whether it is Booth (both Edwin and John Wilks) or Artaud, they were all isane as well as insanely talented. And when they belong to a family of actors (like the Kembles and the Booths) this fallacy becomes a hereditary trait.
Kemble’s journals and memoirs (of which there are MANY) might be flowed by self-indulgence and selective memory, but I’d much rather read them than Clinton’s more careful (and less entertaining) narrative.
