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More copies of this ISBN:This title in other formats:Fanny a Fictionby Edmund White
Synopses & ReviewsPublisher Comments: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. Review:"Edmund White's fictional 'memoir,' written in the assumed voice of Fanny Trollope (mother of the great Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope), does many things usually considered unforgivable in a historical novel. It indulges in anachronism, it subjects the past to the derision of the present and, according to James R. Kincaid, writing in the New York Times Book Review, it is not as good as the book on which it is based, Fanny Trollope's own Domestic Manners of the Americans — though I have my doubts about that claim. Yet Fanny is irresistible 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." Stephanie Zacharek, Salon.com (read the entire Salon review) About the AuthorEdmund White's novels include A Boy's Own Story, The Farewell Symphony and The Married Man He is also the author of a biography of Jean Genet, a study of Proust, and The Flâneur: A Stroll Through the Paradoxes of Paris. Having lived in Paris for many years, he now resides in New York City and teaches at Princeton University. What Our Readers Are SayingBe the first to add a comment for a chance to win!Product Details
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