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

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

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

Francis Anne Kemble was born and raised in England. She became an actress and eventually traveled to America performing. While there she met and eventuallly married Pierce Butler. Butler and Fanny lived in the North, but their money came from Butler's rice plantation in the South.

When Fanny made one

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

A unique and meticulous account of life on a southern plantation during the Antebellum period, Journal of a Residence on A Georgian Plantation in 1838-1839 is a must read for anyone wishing to gain a broader understanding of life in the American slave system.

Having acquired great renown as an accom

A book everyone in America should read, not for style but for content. It gives priceless insight into the life of both slave and slave holder from the eyes of an English woman who married into a slaveholding family. Difficult to read at times due to subject matter but essential nonetheless.

Important reading.

How on earth could the slave owners and overseers not realize that in listening to the complaints of the slaves, this woman was actually doing the owners themselves a favor -rather than increasing discontent, listening gave an outlet to those slaves who confided in her, thus actu