Fanny Kemble citations

Frances Anne "Fanny" Kemble est une actrice et femme de lettres anglaise.

Issue d’une famille d'acteurs de théâtre renommée, elle rencontra d'abord le succès à Londres avant d'épouser en 1834 un riche héritier du sud des États-Unis, Pierce Butler , au terme d’une tournée américaine triomphale. Les limites que son mari tenta d'imposer au comportement de sa femme, et notamment à l'expression publique de ses opinions antiesclavagistes, provoquèrent un divorce retentissant qui obligea Kemble à reprendre une carrière d’actrice qu’elle limita pour l’essentiel à des lectures de Shakespeare.

Fruits de son expérience américaine, son Journal et son Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-1839 , publié en Angleterre après qu’elle eut quitté les États-Unis au début de la guerre de Sécession, furent des succès de librairie considérables, qui restent aujourd’hui encore des sources précieuses sur la vie de plantation dans le Sud. Wikipedia

✵ 27. novembre 1809 – 15. janvier 1893

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Fanny Kemble: 5 citations 0 J'aime

Fanny Kemble: Citations en anglais

“Simplicity is a great element of good breeding.”

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Fanny Kemble

Further Records, 1848-1883, vol. 1; entry dated January 20, 1875 (1891).

“Though the Negroes are fed, clothed, and housed, and though the Irish peasant is starved, naked, and roofless, the bare name of freemen—the lordship over his own person, the power to choose and will—are blessings beyond food, raiment, or shelter; possessing which, the want of every comfort of life is yet more tolerable than their fullest enjoyment without them.”

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Fanny Kemble

Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-1839, ch. 1 (1863).

“As for the exhortation with which Mr. ------ closes his letter, that I will not "go down to my husband's plantation prejudiced against what I am to find there," I know not well how to answer it. Assuredly I am going prejudiced against slavery, for I am an Englishwoman, in whom the absence of such a prejudice would be disgraceful.”

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Fanny Kemble

Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-1839, ch. 1 (1863).

“A good many causes tend to make good masters and mistresses quite as rare as good servants…. The large and rapid fortunes by which vulgar and ignorant people become possessed of splendid houses, splendidly furnished, do not, of course, give them the feelings and manners of gentle folks, or in any way really raise them above the servants they employ, who are quite aware of this fact, and that the possession of wealth is literally the only superiority their employers have over them.”

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Fanny Kemble

Further Records, 1848-1883, vol. 1; entry dated February 12, 1874 (1891).

“I want to do everything in the world that can be done.”

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Fanny Kemble

Journal of a Residence in America, entry for September 11, 1832 (1835).