Women in Slavery
Selections from her Journal of Residence on a Georgian Plantation, 1838-1839
by Frances Anne Kemble
Journal of Residence on a Georgian Plantation (recorded in 1838–1839 but not published until 1863), has secured Fanny Kemble’s reputation as a prescient observer of the plantation world of the antebellum South. While Alexis de Tocqueville and Frederick Law Olmsted wrote about the region as cultural tourists, Fanny Kemble, married to a wealthy American slaveholder, Pierce Butler, with vast holdings in Georgia’s Sea Islands, wrote about her experience on her husband’s estates from the perspective of an “insider” as well as an “outsider.” It was this double consciousness and Kemble’s ability to translate life so dramatically onto the page that provided readers with a sense of being eyewitness to unfolding events. Her rendering of even the most mundane details of everyday life proved fascinating. Her close and vivid remembrances of plantation life have remained enduring.
Women in Slavery details:
ISBN: 978-1-937853-27-3
Words: 12,400
Pages: 27
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