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Literary Imagination Advance Access originally published online on July 14, 2008
Literary Imagination 2008 10(3):304-316; doi:10.1093/litimag/imn047
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© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics. All rights reserved. For permissions please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

"This Strangest of Countries": Fanny Kemble's Letters from America

Alice Hiller*

*Alice Hiller, London.

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

After wintering for the first time on her husband Pierce Butler's Georgia plantations, Fanny Kemble wrote to her cousin Cecilia Combe from Lenox, Massachusetts, on 6 August 1839:

My dear Cecilia I wish there were any likelihood of your coming to Philadelphia again before we migrate it does seem the most ridiculous as well as the most provoking thing that you should be meandering all over this strangest of countries & that I should only brush against you at an inn for a few hurried moments.1

Midway through the letter, this exclamation comes alive as it tracks the trajectories of the two women to their fleeting encounter. Its "few hurried moments" linger with all the intensity of a lovers’ meeting, in Fanny's phrase "brush against you"—bearing witness to her talent as a writer. Cecilia was touring America with her husband, the phrenologist George Combe, and Fanny continues "I delivered your . . . [Full Text of this Article]


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