Fanny: A Fiction - Hardcover

White, Edmund

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060004843 ISBN 13: 9780060004842

Publisher: Ecco / HarperCollins, 2003

Synopsis

"White’s Victorian tale vividly imagines Frances Trollope writing a memoir of her old friend, the radical feminist Frances Wright, decades after the real publication of "Domestic Manners of the Americans," which was based on the two women’s travels through America in the 1820's." -New York Times Book Review

In her fifties, Mrs. Frances Trollope became famous overnight for her book attacking the United States. Twenty-five years later, she sharpens her pen for her most controversial work yet -- the biography of her old friend, the radical and feminist Fanny Wright. She recalls the 1820s when the young Fanny erupted into the Trollopes' sleepy English cottage like a volcano, her red hair flying, her talk aflame with utopian ideals. Before long, Wright has convinced Frances to follow her to America, a journey of extreme penury, frontier hardships, and the most satisfying sensual romance of Frances Trollope's life.

The biography soon degenerates into a settling of scores and digressions on the misadventures of Mrs. Trollope's own family. By turns noble and petty, comic and tragic, it introduces us to literary lions, battling political theorists, gamblers and escaped slaves, and even the aging General Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson. With hallucinatory realism, Mrs. Trollope paints French châteaux, Belgian fogs, Mississippi mud, and the gaudy splendors and cruelties of Haiti. And throughout this sparkling narrative, we find love in all its forms -- in the family, between races and generations, and within the same sex.

Fanny: A Fiction is a wonderful new departure for Edmund White -- a quirky, dazzling story of two extraordinary nineteenth-century women, and a vibrant, questioning exploration of the nature of idealism, the clay feet of heroes, and the illusory power of the American dream.

About this title

About the Author

Edmund White was the author of the novels Fanny: A Fiction, A Boy's Own Story, The Farewell Symphony, and The Married Man; a biography of Jean Genet; a study of Marcel Proust; and, a memoir, My Lives. Having lived in Paris for many years, he settled in New York, and taught at Princeton University.

From the Back Cover

In her fifties, Mrs. Frances Trollope became famous overnight for her book attacking the United States. Twenty-five years later, she sharpens her pen for her most controversial work yet -- the biography of her old friend, the radical and feminist Fanny Wright. She recalls the 1820s when the young Fanny erupted into the Trollopes' sleepy English cottage like a volcano, her red hair flying, her talk aflame with utopian ideals. Before long, Wright has convinced Frances to follow her to America, a journey of extreme penury, frontier hardships, and the most satisfying sensual romance of Frances Trollope's life.

The biography soon degenerates into a settling of scores and digressions on the misadventures of Mrs. Trollope's own family. By turns noble and petty, comic and tragic, it introduces us to literary lions, battling political theorists, gamblers and escaped slaves, and even the aging General Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson. With hallucinatory realism, Mrs. Trollope paints French châteaux, Belgian fogs, Mississippi mud, and the gaudy splendors and cruelties of Haiti. And throughout this sparkling narrative, we find love in all its forms -- in the family, between races and generations, and within the same sex.

Fanny: A Fiction is a wonderful new departure for Edmund White -- a quirky, dazzling story of two extraordinary nineteenth-century women, and a vibrant, questioning exploration of the nature of idealism, the clay feet of heroes, and the illusory power of the American dream.

Reviews

White's most recent novel, the saturnine A Married Man, showed little of the feline, Nabokovian elegance of his early work-most famously, A Boy's Own Story. White triumphantly returns to form with this historical teaser, a novel wrapped inside a "memoir" of Fanny Wright by Mrs. Frances Trollope. The real Mrs. Trollope is best known for Domestic Manners of the Americans, an 1830s disquisition on her travels in America; Fanny Wright is best known as the utopian feminist who lured Mrs. Trollope to America with her disastrous scheme to abolish marriage and solve America's racial divide at Nashoba, a community she founded in Tennessee. White's conceit is that this is Trollope's last book, written when its author is 76, her health and memory failing, decades after her adventures in the wilds of America when she was in her late 40s. Essentially abandoned by Fanny Wright from the moment she steps ashore, Trollope must fend for herself and see to the well-being of her daughters, her son Henry and her companion, Auguste Hervieu. As Trollope discovers, Fanny, like many a progressive activist after her, implements her humanistic idealism at the expense of her humanity. But White's real subject is Trollope herself: caustic, witty, self-aware, genteelly impoverished, cursed with a cold, hypochondriac husband. Trollope's struggle to maintain her own little bit of interior civilization is a joy to witness. Since Trollope's book is a classic, White risks a lot by offering a competing narrative. He succeeds by letting Trollope's pen run into un-Victorian excesses, giving us the unbuttoned view of her travels. The emotional epicenter of the book is Trollope's affair with an ex-slave, Cudjo, in the unpropitious town of Cincinnati. White's novel, while shying from preaching, is a timely reminder that transatlantic critics of America's "domestic manners" sometimes have a good point or two to make.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Critically acclaimed White takes a foray into a new genre, historical fiction, and in doing so he has created a wonderful novel about two very interesting and long-forgotten Englishwomen who made their mark on American politics and society in the mid-1800s. Mrs. Frances Trollope, mother of the novelist Anthony Trollope, is herself the author of a scathing critique of American life. Fanny Wright is a wealthy aristocrat who believes in equality of all people (she is an early feminist) and has taken on the plight of the worker and embraced the cause of abolishing slavery in America. White approaches these two women with a fictional manuscript, meant to be a biography of Fanny Wright written by her friend Frances Trollope. Appearing in the novel are such revered real-life men as the marquis de Lafayette, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison. The "biography" quickly turns into Mrs. Trollope's own memoir as she recounts her experiences with Fanny Wright in the failed utopian community that Wright established. Her tales of her visit to America provide a witty romp through pre-Civil War American manners and etiquette, seen through the eyes of two very different English women. Michael Spinella
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Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Excerpt

Chapter One

Now that her life is over I have decided to write it. Tobe sure I knew her only for a few intense years, butour friendship was central to both of us, if only to indicate the directioneach of us did not choose to take. We spent time together on thehigh seas and in the United States (which she admired and I despised).We seldom agreed on anything and her followers, if there beany left, will doubtless question my right to be her Boswell.

But her numerous enemies, not her few friends, are the readers Iaddress in the hope of vindicating her honor. Nor will I pretend thatthis is the complete account she merits; I am too burdened with otherliterary projects to be able to track down the minutiae or verify eventhe main dates of her passage on earth. And I am writing here in theFrench countryside, far from a library or the confirming or abettingreminiscences of other civilized English men and women. In fact theroad outside this cottage is dusty, the peasant farmer with whom I stayfor the moment shouts all day in an incomprehensible patois, there's aparticularly boisterous rooster ... Fortunately in a few days I will beon my way to Florence and my beloved Villino Trollope.

Fanny Wright had undeniable virtues [develop this thought bythe bye].

But she had, just as undeniably, some faults which I, as her friendand confidante, was particularly privileged to observe. Picture a blazing,ten-log fire sans fire-screen and you'll have a notion of FannyWright's heat and intensity (some would say her glare).

She had red hair, she was tall and slender, her complexion was aspale and lucent as opals - but she was the good kind of redhead, withoutfreckles, though she did have that distinctive scent of the true red-head,when she was overexerting herself, or as the French would say,en nage. [Delete remark on her bodily scent? In dubious taste? Thoughshe gave off, in truth, the smell of a wet collie when she was sweating.]

But I anticipate. I am sitting here en déshabillé on a broken straw-bottomedchair in a room so noisy with clucking and the farmer'sscreeching to his fowl and the ripe scent of damp straw (this house iscovered with thatch) that I might as well lay an egg myself, except I amnot up to it and am waiting here until my fever subsides and my sonTom sends additional funds to complete my overland trip to Tuscany.

Frances Wright ...

Well, I should begin at the beginning. Her problems began with herparents and then their early exit from her life. She was born on September6, 1795 [verify? I'm certain this is correct] in Dundee, a city almostas crowded and filthy as Edinburgh before the New City wasconstructed. In Edinburgh, in the Old City, though the streets wereonly five feet wide and the buildings ten stories tall, the "gentle folk"waited until ten of the evening and then, when the last watch wascalled, all had permission to throw their slops out the window onto thestreet below. Whoever was passing would be foully bespattered andthe rising stench was so great one could sleep only with rose petalspressed to the nostrils. Mind you, Dundee was just as dark and densely settled as Edinburgh, but the Wrights lived on a floor of an ancienthouse, since torn down, by the Nethergate, I believe, whence thefields and gardens were visible and where the citizens would descendand bathe directly in the cold waters of the Tay.

Fanny was preceded by an older brother and followed by herbeloved little sister Camilla, but when Fanny was only three hermother died and her father passed away three short months later. Despitethis early disappearance her father, James Wright, a prosperousDundee merchant, left his mark on the child, for James was the worstsort of freethinker. He had paid to have Thomas Paine's The Rights ofMan reprinted in a ha'penny edition available to the poor, and thisinfamous egalitarian tract, full of mischievous sophistry, could havecondemned the rash man to Botany Bay had he not been so well-connected. Mr. Wright belonged to several numismatics clubs andpossessed very valuable coins; typical of his Jacobin views, he wonderedwhy the public mints employed "the silly morsels of heraldry" indesigning coins rather than "emblems of industry and commerce."Doubtless he wanted our shillings not to present the royal profiles butto show milkmaids plying swollen teats, and our crowns to enshrinedustmen wading through ordure.

Mr. Wright would also have been arrested for belonging to the infamousFriends of the People, a communistical phalanstery in Edinburgh,had he not ridden, all alone, one misty night, out into themurky Tay, where he drowned his devilish papers ... Years later, FannyWright read through the few notes her father had jotted down that hadnot been destroyed that night - and naturally found surprising similaritiesin their turn of mind. He had written, "The spirit of law and thetenor of the conduct of governments in order to be well adapted to themutable and ever-varying state of human affairs ought continually tochange according to existing circumstances and the temper of the age." Notice his emphasis on mutable Circumstance rather than eternalNature and its Laws. Fanny later told me she marveled at the "coincidencein views between father and daughter, separated by deathwhen the first had not reached the age of twenty-nine, and when thelatter was in infancy." I, too, alas, find a terrifying symmetry there, afamily habit of reckless disregard of tradition and a total capitulation toWanton Flux!

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Fanny: A Fictionby Edmund White Copyright ©2003 by Edmund White. Excerpted by permission.
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Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.Copyright © 2003 Edmund White
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Edition details

• Publisher: Ecco / HarperCollins
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0060004843
• ISBN 13: 9780060004842
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 369