Frances Anne Kemble (1809-1893) was a famous London-born actress who toured the United States with her father for several years before marrying the Philadelphia landowner and heir Pierce Butler. Her two-volume journal, first published in 1835 under her married name, shocked the American public for its ungenerous and often biting criticisms of the young country. Detailing Kemble's voyage to and tour of the United States, the journal contains first hand accounts of the cities of the eastern seaboard in the early nineteenth-century and the manners and customs of its people. Noted for its candid observations and strong personal style, Kemble's journal remains one of her most lasting literary works.

Frances Anne Kemble (1809-93) was a famous London-born actress who toured the United States with her father for several years before marrying the Philadelphia landowner and heir Pierce Butler. Her two-volume journal, first published in 1835 under her married name, shocked the American public for its ungenerous and often biting criticisms of the young country. Detailing Kemble's voyage to and tour of the United States, the journal contains first hand accounts of the cities of the eastern seaboard in the early nineteenth-century and the manners and customs of its people. Noted for its candid observations and strong personal style, Kemble's journal remains one of her most lasting literary works.

A few years after her marriage to a wealthy American, the English stage-actress Frances Anne Kemble (1809 1893) moved with her husband to his residence in Georgia, where he had inherited two plantations. There she kept a journal of her shocking observations of the practice of slavery. Written over a period of less than four months, Kemble's journal records her day-to-day encounters with her husband's slaves, and attempts to expose the moral injustice of slavery. The journal circulated privately among her friends, but was not published until 1863, long after Kemble's divorce in 1849. Her book is credited with influencing Britain's position of neutrality during the American Civil War despite the cotton industry's lobbying in favour of the South. Kemble's journal remains a lasting and important critique of slavery, and a valuable document about the nineteenth-century American south.

Originally published in 1863, out-of-print and unavailable for almost a century, Frances Anne Kemble's "Journal" has long been recognized by historians as unique in the literature of American slavery and invaluable for obtaining a clear view of the "peculiar institution" and of life in the antebellum South.

Fanny Kemble was one of the leading lights of the English stage in the nineteenth century. During a tour of America in the 1830s she met and married a wealthy Philadelphian, Pierce Butler, part of whose fortune derived from his family's vast cotton and rice plantation on the Sea Islands of Georgia. After their marriage she spent several months living on the plantation. Profoundly shocked by what she saw, she recorded her observations of plantation life in a series of journal entries written as letters to a friend. But she never sent the letters, and not until the Civil War was on and Fanny was divorced from Pierce Butler and living in England were they published.

This Brown Thrasher edition incorporates the valuable introduction written by John A. Scott for the 1961 edition published by Alfred A. Knopf, together with the editor's appendices to that edition. It provides the modern reader with the historical and biographical background to move freely and with ease in Mrs. Kemble's world.