Records of a Girlhood

605, [5] pp. 8vo. Green leather spine and corners, marbled boards and endpapers, gilt titles and rules, top edge gilt. Frances Anne Kemble's 'Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-1839' 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. Kemble followed the success of these letters with the publication of a volume of plays, and with four volumes of memoirs, of which this is the first. It includes recollections of her early life, as well as transcriptions of numerous letters from the 1820s and 1830s. Some of the content of this work originally appeared in Atlantic Monthly, but new content has been added, and the entire text then revised.