n which Tennyson
incorrectly augured in the "Sonnet to J. M. K." His sister Frances
(invariably, like most though by no means all ladies of her name, called
"Fanny"[42]) was a very remarkable person indeed. After taking early and
with brilliant success to the stage which might almost be said to be
hers by inheritance,[43] she married an American planter with even worse
results (they were actually divorced) than her friend FitzGerald's
marriage brought about later: and for many years returned to public
life, not as an actress but as a reader. She wrote and published both
prose and verse of various kinds: but her best known work and that which
places her here, is a voluminous series of "Records," etc., much of
which is composed of actual letters, while practically the whole of it
is what we have called "letter-stuff." It has perhaps been published
_too_ voluminously: and it is certain that, as indeed one might expect,
its parts are not equal in interest. But experienced and balanced
judgment must always sum up in her favour as possessing, in letter- and
even other writing, more than ordinary talent, perhaps never quite
happily or fully developed. Merely as a person she seems to have
exercised an extraordinary attraction without being exactly amiable[44]:
and from the intellectual and artistic sides as a writer (we have
nothing here to do with her histrionic powers) to have been what has
sometimes in others been called "inorganic," "ill-regulated," "not
brought off," etc., but of extraordinary capacity.

This may have had something to do with her sudden and exceptional
success, when at barely twenty, and with no training except what
heredity might give her, she "took the town [and the country] by storm"
as Juliet, and very soon afterwards "carried" America likewise. But her
"records" of these and other things are of almost the first quality: and
this power of "recording" continued and was perhaps stimulated by the
less as well as the more fortunate events of her life. It may be said
indeed that in her time a young woman of full age (she was five and
twenty), unusual experience of the world, and still more unusual wits,
had no business to marry a planter in the Southern States, knowing that
she was to live there, unless she had reconciled herself to the
institution of slavery. Nor can anybody without prejudice deny this. But
the inconsistency and the troubles it developed gave occasion to some
very remarkable "recording," a