Records of a Girlhood

Records of a Girlhood

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Records of a Girlhood, by Frances
Ann Kemble This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost
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Title: Records of a Girlhood
Author: Frances Ann Kemble
Release Date: August 8, 2005 [EBook #16478]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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OF A GIRLHOOD ***

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[Transcriber's note: The spellings in this book are inconsistent in the
original, and have not been corrected except in the index as explicitly
noted below.]
[Illustration: Fanny Kemble]

RECORDS OF A GIRLHOOD

BY
FRANCES ANN KEMBLE
_SECOND EDITION._
[Illustration]
NEW YORK HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 1880.

COPYRIGHT, 1879, BY HENRY HOLT & CO.
JOHN A. GRAY, Agent, TYPE-SETTING MACHINERY, 16 & 18
JACOB STREET, NEW YORK.

PREFATORY NOTE.
Considerable portions of this work originally appeared in the Atlantic
Monthly, but there is added to these a large amount of new matter not
hitherto published, and the whole work has been thoroughly revised.

RECORDS OF A GIRLHOOD.
CHAPTER I.
A few years ago I received from a friend to whom they had been
addressed a collection of my own letters, written during a period of
forty years, and amounting to thousands--a history of my life.
The passion for universal history (_i.e._ any and every body's story)
nowadays seems to render any thing in the shape of personal
recollections good enough to be printed and read; and as the public
appetite for gossip appears to be insatiable, and is not unlikely some
time or other to be gratified at my expense, I have thought that my own

gossip about myself may be as acceptable to it as gossip about me
written by another.
I have come to the garrulous time of life--to the remembering days,
which only by a little precede the forgetting ones. I have much leisure,
and feel sure that it will amuse me to write my own reminiscences;
perhaps reading them may amuse others who have no more to do than I
have. To the idle, then, I offer these lightest of leaves gathered in the
idle end of autumn days, which have succeeded years of labor often
severe and sad enough, though its ostensible purpose was only that of
affording recreation to the public.
* * * * *
There are two lives of my aunt Siddons: one by Boaden, and one by the
poet Campbell. In these biographies due mention is made of my
paternal grandfather and grandmother. To the latter, Mrs. Roger
Kemble, I am proud to see, by Lawrence's portrait of her, I bear a
personal resemblance; and I please myself with imagining that the
likeness is more than "skin deep." She was an energetic, brave woman,
who, in the humblest sphere of life and most difficult circumstances,
together with her husband fought manfully a hard battle with poverty,
in maintaining and, as well as they could, training a family of twelve
children, of whom four died in childhood. But I am persuaded that
whatever qualities of mind or character I inherit from my father's
family, I am more strongly stamped with those which I derive from my
mother, a woman who, possessing no specific gift in such perfection as
the dramatic talent of the Kembles, had in a higher degree than any of
them the peculiar organization of genius. To the fine senses of a savage
rather than a civilized nature, she joined an acute instinct of correct
criticism in all matters of art, and a general quickness and accuracy of
perception, and brilliant vividness of expression, that made her
conversation delightful. Had she possessed half the advantages of
education which she and my father labored to bestow upon us, she
would, I think, have been one of the most remarkable persons of her
time.
My mother was the daughter of Captain Decamp, an officer in one of

the armies that revolutionary France sent to invade republican
Switzerland. He married the daughter of a farmer from the
neighborhood of Berne. From my grandmother's home you could see
the great Jungfrau range of the Alps, and I sometimes wonder whether
it is her blood in my veins that so loves and longs for those supremely
beautiful mountains.
Not long after his marriage my grandfather went to Vienna, where, on
the anniversary of the birth of the great Empress-King, my mother was
born, and named, after her, Maria Theresa. In Vienna, Captain Decamp
made the acquaintance of a young English nobleman, Lord Monson