Fanny Kemble and Kemble Street
Near Lenox, Massachusetts
The street this road meets carries the name of one of the most colorful figures ever to make Lenox her home, the English actress Fanny Kemble. Frances Anne Kemble came from a celebrated British theatrical family and won instant fame on her American tour in the eighteen thirties. Through her friendship with the writer Catharine Sedgwick, whose family lived in Lenox, Kemble fell in love with the Berkshires.
She had married an American, Pierce Butler, who turned out to be the heir to a large Georgia plantation worked by hundreds of enslaved people. What Kemble saw there horrified her and turned her into a fierce abolitionist, and her journal of plantation life became a powerful anti slavery document. Her marriage collapsed, and after a painful divorce, finalized in eighteen forty-nine, she returned to the stage and eventually bought a home in Lenox.
She gave hugely popular public readings of Shakespeare, and with the proceeds she made this town her refuge. Kemble Street is named in her honor. Kemble was a writer as well as a performer, and her sharp, independent voice left a lasting mark on this quiet corner of Massachusetts.
