Fanny: A Fiction - by Edmund White (Paperback)

Book 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.

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 convinced her to follow her to America, a journey of extreme penury, frontier hardships, and the most satisfying sensual romance of Frances Trollope's life.

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.

Review Quotes

"Fanny is a post-modern historical novel whose narrator is amusingly incapable of being self-reflexive. Edmund White's encyclopedic knowledge transports us to a past that ironically illuminates the present." -- Ann Beattie

"White playfully sexes the past with the juice that was dreamed about or was really there and expurgated from published accounts. " -- Chicago Tribune

"Through Edmund White's impressive act of ventriloquism, Fanny Trollope emerges here as the kind of narrator many readers secretly want, "not abstract and Masculine, but gossipy and Feminine." In her travels through pre-Adolescent America, she meets everyone worth meeting--from Jefferson to Robert Owen--and her conclusions about the country and its citizens point up the things about America that, nearly two hundred years later, Europeans continue to find so peculiar. With Fanny: A Fiction, Edmund White has found a new arrow in his quiver, after shooting so many, so accurately, for so long." -- African Sun Times

"Fanny is impressively researched and carefully constructed, a complex narrative that speaks in a series of layered voices." -- San Francisco Chronicle

"Edmund White in Fanny has brought to vibrant life a pair of bold, complicated, opinionated women, and set them against teeming parade of the grea and not-so-great who featured in their turbulently radical lives. In the process and with consummate style and authority, he has created a living portrait of several momentous decades in the early history of the republic. It is a glorious accomplishment, a historical novel of the very highest quality by a writer at the peak of his artistic and intellectual powers. Fanny confirms Edmunds White's reputation as one of the most brilliant and distinguished authors at work in America today." -- Patrick McGrath

"A wonderful novel." -- Booklist (starred)

"Fanny is irresistable because it also has what every novel needs and so few these days possess: an entirely winning character who does all sorts of interesting things." -- Salon.com

"Delectable storytelling fun" -- Seattle Times

"White has finely finished his own phrases, leaving us entranced by two firey feminists, enlightened by his informed historical insight, and perplexed over the continued elusive nature of the American dream." -- San Francisco Gate

"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