Edmund White, Fanny: A Fiction (HarperCollins Publishers, 2003)

Over the last year, I have become completely hooked on Anthony Trollope's novels. Like his French contemporaries Honoré de Balzac and Émile Zola, Trollope was a prolific writer, so I can entertain myself with his complex tales of the British ruling class for a long, long time.

When I get this attached to a writer, I spend time learning about his/her life and milieu. Thus I knew that Trollope's mother Frances (Fanny) was herself a writer. It wasn't terribly unusual for educated women in early to mid-nineteenth century England to establish writing careers. What made Fanny unique in this regard is that she didn't start her career as a writer until she was over fifty. Her first book, Domestic Manners of the Americans, published in 1832, brought her immediate success. Over the next twenty years, she wrote five other travel books and over thirty novels. (Most of her oeuvre is long out of print.)

Edmund White obviously found her story sufficiently fascinating to use as the basis for his latest novel, Fanny: A Fiction. To make matters just slightly complicated, he uses Frances Trollope as the narrator of this novel, which is presented as the biography of her sometime friend Frances Wright, another Fanny. To avoid any confusion in this review, I will call these ladies Mrs. T. and Miss W., respectively.

While her children were still relatively young and her husband relatively functional, Mrs. T. liked to hold social gatherings at their home. Miss W., a Scots-born social activist sixteen years younger than her erstwhile biographer, became a frequent guest at these gatherings starting in the early 1820s, just after she and her younger sister Camilla returned from their first trip to America. Mrs. T. found the younger Fanny utterly intriguing. In 1823 Mrs. T. traveled to France with her husband and oldest son Henry to rendezvous with Miss W. at La Grange, the home of the Marquis de Lafayette, that venerable hero of the American Revolution. Miss W., it turns out, had a predilection for older men, especially famous older men.

The two Miss Ws. subsequently made a second trip to America as part of Lafayette's entourage. Fanny returned to England nearly three years later, leaving Camilla behind in America. She appeared at the Trollope residence in October 1827, and managed in a very short time — less than a month — to convince Mrs. T. to pack up and go back to America with her. The attraction was Nashoba, a settlement in Tennessee that Miss W. had established with the intent of using it as a place where former slaves could transition safely to lives as free people before being transported to Liberia or Haiti. Mrs. T. was also escaping an ailing husband and dwindling financial resources at home.

The voyage to America took nearly two months. The steamboat trip up the Mississippi from New Orleans to Memphis exposed the travelers (Mrs. T., her son Henry, her two daughters and a French artist named Auguste Hervieu) to mud, mosquitoes and alligators — which Mrs. T. mistakenly called crocodiles. Expecting a peaceful, pastoral scene of houses and barns and trees and healthy happy people at Nashoba, Mrs. T. and her companions found desolation and despair instead. To put it quite bluntly, Miss W. sold Mrs. T. a dream that had virtually no truth to it. Abruptly and none too happily parting ways with Miss W., they took a steamboat upriver to Cincinnati, where they remained until late February 1830. Mrs. T.'s various schemes to make enough money to survive — relying heavily on Auguste's talents and on infusions of money and goods from Mr. Trollope in England — are well documented in the historical records.

As a matter of fact, everything I have divulged of the "plot" of this novel in the preceding paragraphs is a matter of historical record. As I read the book and as I write this review, I refer to my copy of Domestic Manners of the Americans, Neville-Sington's 1997 biography, Fanny Trollope: The Life and Adventures of a Clever Woman, and the Oxford Reader's Companion to Trollope (which focuses on Anthony but which refers to his family members as well). Some of the incidents depicted in Fanny: A Fiction are perilously close retellings of the same incidents as described in the first two of these references. Although I have no comparable printed references on Frances Wright, the on-line biographies I easily find using Google are also consistent with the information in this book.

So, you might ask, what makes this a fiction? First of all, while Frances Trollope certainly knew and admired Frances Wright and indeed followed her to America, Mrs. T. did NOT write a biography of Miss W. While Auguste Hervieu did travel with Mrs. T. and her son Henry and two youngest daughters to America, there is no evidence to suggest that Auguste and Henry were lovers, a relationship that Edmund White, who is gay, insinuates in a very entertaining manner throughout Mrs. T.'s narration. In fact, many historians suggest that Auguste and Mrs. T. had an affair of some sort. I think they find it difficult to explain Auguste's considerable financial and personal commitment to the Trollope family in any other way. The historical record does not provide evidence that Mrs. T. had an affair with a runaway slave while she lived in Cincinnati, although we are quite certain that the last several years of her marriage were not emotionally or sexually fulfilling. Finally, while Miss W. did travel to Haiti with the slaves from the Nashoba settlement, Mrs. W. did not accompany her on that journey. White mentions these flights of fancy in his Acknowledgements section at the end of the book.

Well-written historical fiction like this provides a palatable way for many people to learn about other times. I doubt that I would have read nearly so much of Domestic Manners of the Americans or the Fanny Trollope biography if I hadn't already been reading Fanny: A Fiction. Mrs. T.'s acerbic perspectives on American culture in the early nineteenth century provide a refreshing alternative to the more familiar work of Alexis de Toqueville. My exposure to the unconventional lives of Mrs. T. and Miss W. also helps me to make sense of some of the strong-willed female characters who appear in Anthony Trollope's novels.

[Donna Bird]