As you may know, many of the characters in the novel Dual Memory are named after tulips because the novel was vaguely inspired by the tulip bubble in Holland in the 1630s.

In my novel, Miss Fanny Kemble is an artist driven out of a shared studio by a jealous rival.

The flower called Miss Fanny Kemble is a “broken” tulip from the early 1830s praised as the finest tulip ever produced in England. 

The tulip was named after a popular young actress, Fanny Kemble, born into a British theater family in 1809. She toured the United States in the 1830s performing Shakespeare and became so popular that other women copied her hairstyle.

In 1834, she married an American, then discovered that he was an heir to a plantation in Georgia. She was repelled by the slavery there, and the marriage didn’t last long, but she recorded the “simple horror” of what she saw and published a book, Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-1839. It helped cement European support for the Union in the Civil War.

Works about her include the biography Fanny Kemble’s Civil Wars by Catherine Clinton, published by Oxford University Press. Photo from public domain.