Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation, 1838–1839

Name: Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation, 1838–1839
Brand: Blackstone Audiobooks
Availability: InStock
Author: Frances Anne Kemble
ISBN: 9781982530099

Author: Frances Anne Kemble

Narrator: Alison Larkin

Unabridged: 12 hr 33 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Blackstone Publishing

Published: 06/25/2019

Categories: Nonfiction, Social Science, Slavery

Synopsis

A personal indictment of the institute of slavery in the Southern United States, as witnessed directly by Fanny Kemble, a British actress in 1838 and 1839. Her husband, the heir to the plantations in Georgia, however, forebade her to publish this material on pain of never seeing her daughters again. She complied, until the two daughters had reached the age of twenty-one, and then allowed the journal to be published in 1863, when the Northern troops were already present along the coast near the Altamaha River, where the plantations were located. In a very personal way, she relates her many varied experiences, efforts to make life easier for the slaves despite her husband’s stubborn resistance. As an English citizen, she had seen the total end of slavery throughout the British Empire in 1833, just a few years before her journey to Georgia. She ends her account with a stirring defense of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which had raised such a storm of controversy in the United States. Like Stowe, Kemble sees all sides of the situation, with her eyes and with her heart.

About Frances Anne Kemble

Frances Anne “Fanny” Kemble (1809–1893) was a notable British actress from a theater family in the early and mid-nineteenth 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 theater.

About Alison Larkin

Alison Larkin was born in Washington, DC, adopted at six weeks old by British parents, and raised in England and Africa. After graduating from Royal Holloway College, London University, and the Webber-Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art, she became a playwright and classical actress on the British stage. Then, at twenty-eight, she found her birth mother, who was living in Bald Mountain, Tennessee. The experience turned her into a stand-up comic. She was soon headlining at the Comic Strip in New York and the Comedy Store in Los Angeles, while maintaining her theatrical career. She also spent three years under a studio development contract to star in her own sitcom with ABC, CBS, and Jim Henson Productions. Her unusually wide range of voices can be heard in cartoons and movies, from work by James Cameron and Robert Altman to Pocahontas and The Wonder Pets. The audiobook of The English American, narrated by Alison, won an AudioFile Earphones Award.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Paul

The journal that Frances Anne “Fanny” Kemble kept, during her months of residence at her husband’s plantation in coastal Georgia in 1838 and 1839, provides a powerful and wrenching look at the institution of slavery in the Deep South during the antebellum era. Kemble’s gift for observation and her e......more

Goodreads review by Frederick

Frances Anne Kemble’s ‘Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation (1838-1839) is one of the most remarkable primary-source first-person narratives of slavery that I’ve read. This is not the least because she had no crusade as she did not publish her diary, as I read, until 1863 although her mem......more

Goodreads review by Jeff

This is one of those books that I'm glad I read, but was glad to be finished with. Before I read it, I knew that Kemble was a British actress who spent a winter on a Georgia plantation before the Civil War, but I didn't know the whole story, which was only slowly revealed in the text. (A little web......more

Goodreads review by Bob

After having read this, my father-in-law took it up on a visit. He wasn't finished when it was his time to leave so I gave it to him. When I started rebuilding my library I decided I had to purchase it again. I never really fully understood the horrors of slavery until I read this book. Frances Anne......more