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Fanny Kemble (1809-93) was the niece of two Shakespearean tragedians, Sarah Siddons and Siddons’s brother, John Philip Kemble. Her father and her French mother were also actors. In fact her whole extended family constituted the foremost theatrical dynasty of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Handsome and gifted, they crop up in letters and diaries throughout the period, and were generally regarded as a kind of royalty: a race apart.
The real competition for any biographer of Kemble is Kemble herself. As her friend Henry James noted: “in two hemispheres, she had seen everyone, had known everyone”. What’s more, she recorded it all in many volumes of vividly written memoirs, all swarming with people, criticism, social commentary, anecdote, scenery, political opinion and superb set-pieces: the digging of Brunel’s Thames tunnel, for instance.
Kemble’s memoirs, especially her “Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation”, are as important historically as they are engrossing. But what fascinates us now is the way that Fanny, clever and reckless as she was, broke the rules—or the way she appropriated and revised the role prescribed to her by gender politics. She never cared about such prescriptions. She spoke her mind and thought nothing of walking into a stream fully clothed if it was hot. It wasn’t until her marriage that her gender collided with the realities of power and money. Though she was never intended for the stage, the looming bankruptcy of her father obliged her to try her chances. Overnight, she became the toast of London. Money flowed, and yet more on a tour of America, where she met a seductive young man, Pierce Butler, heir to huge rice and cotton slave-plantations in Georgia. Hoping to escape the shallow emotionalism of the theatre, assuming a companionship of equals and somehow managing to forget the slaves, she married him.
At a stroke she lost everything. Butler, deeply illiberal, exerted his rights. He appropriated her earnings, censored her writing and when she woke to the horrors of slavery, forbade her public opposition to it. She wept, she ran away, she returned. The birth of children, in whom she had no legal rights, further enchained her.
The rest of Kemble’s life was sheer indomitability. The Butlers did divorce. She did lose the children. But on their majority, she recovered them. She made her own money again. Criss-crossing the Atlantic, she gave Shakespeare readings to packed audiences. Every summer, she climbed the Alps, startling the guides by singing loudly as she went. She met James in 1872 and he fell under her spell, fascinated by her proud idealism, her eccentric honesty and above all by her talk of “old London”. “She reanimated the old drawing rooms,” he wrote, “relighted the old lamps, retuned the old pianos.” When at last she died, he felt it, he said, “like the end of some reign or the fall of some empire”.
1. What is implied in the first paragraph?
A) The Kemble family kept a huge amount of diaries and letters.
B) Fanny Kemble was a renowned actress of Shakespearean plays.
C) This passage mainly focuses on the life of Fanny Kemble.
D) The Kemble family was once a royal family separated from common people.
2. The author mentions Fanny’s memoirs in the second paragraph to show that _______.
A) Fanny was a prolific autobiographer of herself who can compete with all her biographers
B) Fanny wrote biographers for her family members and historical events
C) Fanny’s writings are both entertaining and of historical importance
D) Fanny was a better biographer than an actress
3. The author’s attitude towards Fanny Kemble is probably one of _______.
A) strong hatred
B) enthusiastic support
C) mild satire
D) objective
4. Fanny decided to marry Pierce Butler for the following reasons EXCEPT _______.
A) she did not enjoy her career as an actress
B) she longed for an ordinary life with an equal company
C) she was attracted by the handsome Pierce Butler
D) she forgot the existence of slavery in American plantations
5. The text intends to express the idea that _______.
A) Fanny Kemble had a life that is full of adversities and misfortunes
B) Fanny Kemble seldom enjoyed her life because of continuous financial restraints
C) Fanny Kemble held an optimistic attitude towards the ups and downs of her life
D) Fanny Kemble went through a dramatic life in which she remained in the dominant position