Fanny Kemble, Berkshires first literary refugee

From Sedgwick guest to Lenox homeowner

By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, Jan. 20, 2025 – Fanny Kemble met Catharine Maria Sedgwick in the 1830s, while she was the sensation of the theater world, on tour in America to raise money to rescue London’s Covent Garden Theater from bankruptcy under her father’s management.

They became fast friends, and before long Fanny was frequently in residence at the Curtis Hotel in Lenox. Soon enough, she built The Perch, an estate located on the street now named for her. A boulder with brass plaque now marks the spot, across the street from Canyon Ranch.

The spot is roughly equidistant from where Ms. Sedgwick’s sister-in-law Kate maintained The Hive, a school for young women (where Springlawn now is), and where, many years later, Edith Wharton would build The Mount. On the attendance rolls at The Hive will be found, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s daughter Ellen, as well as Jenny Jerome, who became Lady Randolf Churchill, mother of Winston!

If you, too, enjoy the sideshows of irony and coincidence, then you’ll be delighted to know that the mother of Churchill’s lifelong nemesis, Eamon de Valera, also lived in Lenox during the 1800s.

Not only is Lenox a beautiful place to live, but…

Struck by the view from the town graveyard, Fanny Kemble is said to have remarked, “Not only is Lenox a beautiful place to live, but it is also a beautiful place to die.”

Adjacent to the graveyard is the Church on the Hill, where Kemble delivered one of her recitations from Shakespeare, in order to repay the generosity of Lenoxians. When she requested that proceeds be used for the benefit of the poor, she was told. “but there are no poor in Lenox.”

Journal of a Residence on a Georgia Plantation

Written in 1838 – 1839 by Fanny Kemble in the form of letters to Mrs. Charles “Kate” Sedgwick, Journal of a Residence on a Georgia Plantation is regarded as one of the most powerful anti-slavery books ever written.

Mrs. Sedgwick’s argument that African slaves on Georgia plantations were treated better by their American owners than the Irish were treated in Ireland by the English, is thought to be one of the reasons that publication of the book was suppressed more than 20 years.

When finally published in England in 1863, it was credited with turning the tide of public sentiment away from England’s joining the war in support of the Confederacy.