The Project Gutenberg EBook of Records of a Girlhood, by Frances Ann Kemble

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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: ASCII

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[Transcriber's note: The spellings in this book are inconsistent in
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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 o