Constance Wright

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2689651.html

For some years now, I have been fascinated by the nineteenth-century actress and writer Fanny Kemble, and I'm still waiting for someone to write a good comprehensive biography of her. (Maybe me, in fifteen years when I retire.) This book, published in 1972, fills one of the gaps in the more recent biography by Deirdre David in that it concentrates on her relationship with America (the "lovely land" of the title), and with one particular American, Pierce Butler, and with the issue of slavery - in particular, going into how the letters that became the Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation 1838-1839 were written, and how they came to be published twenty-five years later. There is lots of good circumstantial detail about antebellum Philadelphia, New York, Washington, and of course the Georgia islands of the Butler plantation. (Incidentally, Pierce Butler's grandfather, also Pierce Butler, had provided refuge on his island plantation to Aaron Burr in 1804 immediately after the duel in which Alexander Hamilton was killed; in 1736, the same islands were also the American base for Charles Wesley, with his brother John just down the road.) There's a lot of good comparative stuff about how Kemble's perceptions of America differed from other contemporary English visitors, contrasting her more touchy-feely approach with the intellectualisation of the likes of Harriet Martineau (they did not get on).

At the same time, there's a huge elephant in the room which simply isn't mentioned, and which on reflection I haven't seen mentioned much in any of the writings on Kemble that I have seen. Quite simply, she was a feminist. Her marriage broke down because she insisted on behaving as her husband's equal, and Pierce Butler, scion of a Georgian plantation family, simply could not cope with this. Her favourite Shakespeare character was Portia, whose crowning moment is when she assumes a male role and wins (she hated being Juliet, which was the role people always wanted to push her into). The Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation is full of material which could only be written by a feminist abolitionist, and the rest of her career is equally full of commentary on gender politics. Wright is not the only biographer to miss this, but she's the most political of Kemble's biographers who I've read and it seems therefore particularly lacking here.

My other complaint, and it's one I've made before about Kemble's biographers, is that she was in general a better writer than those who write about her, so it's a shame not to hear a bit more of her own voice here - there's almost an assumption that the reader is already familiar with her writings. She was a complex and fascinating character, and people who knew her either loved her or hated her; and subsequent history has not done her justice.… (lisätietoja)

'But my dear good people why do you follow me about? I am only just another soldier's wife.' So said Queen Louise of Prussia (1776 - 1810) when the court had pulled back to the town Naumburg on the Saale in the face of Napoleon's terrifying advance. It was charmingly disingenuous, as Constance Wright makes clear in this excellent biography, but with a deadly political purpose - solidarity with the subjects of her husband Frederick William III and to rally them in their darkest times to defy the French dictator and his army.

Napoleon in turn was fascinated and horrified by Queen Louise. She was a beautiful woman with an intelligent mind and good political instincts which she used against him. That he could not bear. For stepping out of what he perceived as her woman's sphere, he denigrated and maligned her as a previous generation had Marie Antoinette. Louise, by contrast, was much cleverer and more astute - there's an unforgettable scene as she rides at the head of Prussian troops through the Brandenberg Gate - and right and justice was on her side.

While she was active, political and ready for the fight her husband preferred to vacillate and aim for compromise. Their marriage was a love match that deepened and changed into something much more dynamic and relevant in a time of war. As she wrote to him: ‘Dear friend, how happy I am to have you here. It is always better for us to be together.’ Having convinced her husband to fight she wrote to the Russian emperor Alexander, 'We are treading the path of honour now, and it would be better to go under than to turn back.' She died at a tragically early age before she saw the liberation of her homeland.… (lisätietoja)