Restrictions to Access

No restrictions. Open for research.

Copyright Notice

Copyright is retained by the authors of items in these papers, or their descendants, as stipulated by United States copyright law.

Preferred Citation

[Identification of item], in the Jane Fraser Volumes #5187-z, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Acquisitions Information

Received from John Hart of Norfolk, England, in November 2004 (Acc. 99951)

Sensitive Materials Statement

Manuscript collections and archival records may contain materials with sensitive or confidential information that is protected under federal or state right to privacy laws and regulations, the North Carolina Public Records Act (N.C.G.S. § 132 1 et seq.), and Article 7 of the North Carolina State Personnel Act (Privacy of State Employee Personnel Records, N.C.G.S. § 126-22 et seq.). Researchers are advised that the disclosure of certain information pertaining to identifiable living individuals represented in this collection without the consent of those individuals may have legal ramifications (e.g., a cause of action under common law for invasion of privacy may arise if facts concerning an individual's private life are published that would be deemed highly offensive to a reasonable person) for which the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill assumes no responsibility.

Processed by: Jesse Brown, December 2004

Encoded by: Jesse Brown, December 2004

The following terms from Library of Congress Subject Headings suggest topics, persons, geography, etc. interspersed through the entire collection; the terms do not usually represent discrete and easily identifiable portions of the collection--such as folders or items.

Clicking on a subject heading below will take you into the University Library's online catalog.

• American literature--Southern States.
• Charleston (S.C.)--Social life and customs.
• Children's literature, American--Women authors.
• Children's stories, American.
• Expatriate authors--France.
• Family--South Carolina--Social life and customs.
• Fiction--19th century.
• France--History--Revolution, 1789-1799--Fiction.
• Fraser, Jane, b. 1786.
• Southern States--Social life and customs--1775-1865.
• Women authors, American--South Carolina--19th century.
• Women--South Carolina--Social life and customs.

• Charles Phillips Papers (#2462)

Jane Fraser was born in 1786 in Charleston, S.C., the daughter of Major Thomas Fraser, a British officer who had commanded the South Carolina Royalists in the American Revolutionary War. The Fraser family moved to Bordentown, N.J., in the early part of the nineteenth century. There, Jane Fraser's sister, Caroline Fraser (1810-1879) married Prince Lucien Murat (1803-1878), nephew of Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, who had been living in exile in Bordentown, N.J. After Lucien Murat squandered much of the family's fortune, Jane Fraser and Caroline Fraser Murat opened a boarding school for young women at their residence, Linden Hall. After the Revolution of 1848, Lucien Murat returned to France, where he received a number of government appointments. Jane Fraser accompanied Caroline Fraser Murat and her children to Paris, France, in 1849. They lived in the Chateau de Buzenval, outside Paris where Jane Fraser produced her volumes.

The collection includes four handwritten volumes of unpublished literature produced by Jane Fraser in 1862 while living in France. The first two volumes, entitled "Aunt Jane's American Tales and Sketches," are dated 7 September 1862, although the material within was likely written in the late 1830s or early 1840s, when the first of her sister's children was reaching the age of ten. The two volumes contain 14 children's stories, most of them fictional. In the preface, Fraser stated that the stories were never meant to be published; therefore, they were probably intended to serve as a reminder to her sister's children of their American origins. The third volume, "Celestine, a Tale of the Eighteenth Century," is a novel set during the French Revolution. It is dated 20 December 1862, although in the preface, Jane Fraser claimed to have written the novel in 1802, when she was 16 years old. The novel tells the story of a French woman, imprisoned by revolutionaries, who escapes to England to search for her son, who had been taken away by her estranged husband. The fourth volume, entitled "Letters Between Julia and Lucy," is a novel written in the form of a correspondence between Julia, a seminary pupil, and Lucy, a woman who travels widely. Some of the "letters" seem to indicate Jane Fraser's own memories of her southern upbringing and her opinions on the state of southern society at the time.