Faith

Better trust all and be deceived,

And weep that trust and that deceiving,

Than doubt one heart that, if believed,

Had blessed one’s life with true believing.

O, in this mocking world too fast

The doubting fiend o’ertakes our youth!

Better be cheated to the last

Than lose the blessed hope of truth.

-       Fanny Kemble[1]

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[1] Frances Anne Kemble was born in 1809 into the first family of the British stage. After her debut as Juliet in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, she became an icon. She found international fame on her tour of the East Coast of the United States in the fall of 1832. On tour she met Pierce Mease Butler, a wealthy plantation owner; they fell in love and married in 1834. Frances left acting, but hoped to pursue her literary interests. She became a best-selling author when her Journal of Frances Anne Butler appeared in 1835, and the book scandalized American readers with her candid assessments of her adopted country.

In December 1838 Butler took Frances and their two young daughters to his vast holdings on St. Simons and Butler’s islands. She was morally opposed to slavery, and he hoped a visit would rid her of this. It didn’t work: during the winter of 1838-39, Frances’ diary became an impassioned eyewitness account of the wrongs of slavery. 

Her battles with her husband over harsh treatment of slaves contributed to a permanent impasse, followed by a marital separation in 1845 and a divorce in 1849. Although abolitionists encouraged Frances to publish the vivid diary of her days in Georgia, she resisted, so as not to antagonize Butler, who maintained custody of their two daughters. But during the Civil War, she became alarmed about foreign attitudes toward the Confederacy and published her Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-1839 in England. It caused a sensation. Frances later moved to Philadelphia, where she supported herself by touring the United States and Europe with her Shakespeare readings. She continued to travel until her death in 1893, in London.  (Source: New Georgia Encyclopedia)