Frances Anne "Fanny" Kemble (27 November 1809 - 15 January 1893) was a notable British actress from a theatre family in the early and mid-19th century. She was a well-known and popular writer, whose published works included plays, poetry, eleven volumes of memoirs, travel writing and works about the theatre.
In 1834, Kemble retired from the stage to marry an American, Pierce Mease Butler. Although they met and lived in Philadelphia, Butler was the grandson of Pierce Butler, a Founding Father, and heir to a large fortune in cotton, tobacco and rice plantations. By the time the couple's daughters, Sarah and Frances, were born, Butler had inherited three of his grandfather's Sea Island plantations and the hundreds of people who were enslaved on them.
The family visited Georgia during the winter of 1838-39, where they lived at the plantations at Butler and St. Simons islands, in conditions primitive compared to their house in Philadelphia. Kemble was shocked by the living and working conditions of the slaves and their treatment at the hands of the overseers and managers. She tried to improve conditions and complained to her husband about slavery, and about the mixed-race slave children attributed to the overseer, Roswell King, Jr.
When the family returned to Philadelphia in the spring of 1839, Kemble and her husband were suffering marital tensions. In addition to their disagreements over treatment of the slave families at Butler's plantations, Kemble was "embittered and embarrassed" by Butler's marital infidelities. Butler threatened to deny Kemble access to their daughters if she published any of her observations about the plantations. By 1845, the marriage had failed irretrievably, and Kemble returned to Europe.
