Book Reading Wednesday - Fanny by Edmund White

Edmund White has written some of my most satisfactory reading experiences of both fiction and non-fiction. Published in 2003, I missed Fanny, doubtless because I had begun the classwork for acquiring my MLS for Information and Library Sciences. I was doing no recreational reading in those years which included a leave of absence from the program to move to New Orleans for the Rockefeller Foundation Award at the Stone Center at Tulane University. There I read for a long research project conducted as an independent study with one my MLS professors, and after that I read nothing but materials connected to both The World That Made New Orleans andThe Year Before the Flood. So, yes, I missed even the news this novel had been published.

Yet, Fanny is filled with all 'my stuff,' so to speak: English Victorian fiction and history; biography; a New Orleans just recently possessed by the Americans; Lafayette's final triumphant tour of a U.S. initiating Jacksonian democracy; a visit to Point Breeze, the estate of of Napoleon's brother, Joseph, who retired himself and very large fortune from France and Europe to New Jersey*; the conditions of slavery through the eyes of someone not of the U.S. -- and how very quickly she adapts to the convenience. This is a fictional biography, narrated in first person, by Frances Trollope, who wrote one of the classic works of earlier America, referred to by all and sundry, English or American, who wishes to write of early America, 

Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832).  It contained some quite unattractive truths about us, highliighting particularly the obsessive masculine habit of spitting tobacco anywhere, everywhere, all the time.**
Frances Trollope wrote other works of non-fiction and well as many novels.  Among her children was the novelist,Anthony Trollope. She is at least partly the model of the novelist forever seeking 'puffs' for her books in Anthony Trollope's novel, The Way We Live Now, considered among his best works. 

However, the real focus of White's Fanny, is not Fanny Trollope, but her friend,

Fanny Wright. Wright's career as a public intellectual - social reformer -- to be such as a woman was a rare thing in those days -- was made initially with her book,

Views of Society and Manners in America (1821). Wright was the one who got Francis Trollope to America to participate in the preposterous utopian Nashoba Commune in Tennessee, from which Mrs Trollope and the children she'd taken with her (Anthony was left at home to starve with his mentally incompent father) was fortunate to escape finally, still alive, but barely.

White's Frances Trollope is revealed as a keen observer of very much, while remaining extraordinarily blind about certain matters most personally close to her.  It's a tour de force of a novel in the sense of observation, sensibility and voice. I enjoyed this very much.  But then, as mentioned above -- this is all my stuff.  

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*   Joseph financed his move to Breezy Point with the sale of the works of art he plundered from Spanish palaces, castles, monasteries and town halls; his wife, Julie Clary, by marriage with Napoleon's brother, was named Queen consort of Spain and the Indies, Queen consort of Naples and Sicily, and the Comtesse de Survilliers. Her sister, Désirée Clary, six years younger, became Queen of Sweden and Norway when her husband, Marshal Bernadotte, was crowned King Charles XIV John of Sweden (Charles III John of Norway). Their brother, Nicholas Joseph Clary, was created 1st Comte Clary and married Anne Jeanne Rouyer. It paid off very well to marry a Bonaparte.

**  Other Europeans remarked particularly on this habit as well, including famously Charles Dickens in hisAmerican Notes concerning his 1841 visit to the U.S., and his consequent novel, Martin Chuzzlewit, which took on particularly U.S. copyright violations of writers like himself.