"Fanny: A Fiction" is set in the 1820s and '30s, describing two real British women named Fanny. One, Fanny Wright (1795-1852), was a radical socialist who fought for free love and the abolition of slavery in America. Fanny Trollope (1779-1863) was a prolific writer and matriarch of a large family, including son Anthony, who himself became a famous novelist.
As described in Pamela Neville-Sington's solid biography "Fanny Trollope: The Life and Adventures of a Clever Woman," she was intrigued by Fanny Wright's attempt to found a utopian colony called Nashoba outside of Memphis. Mrs. Trollope even joined the colony with some of her children (excluding Anthony) but was quickly disillusioned, and eventually wrote a highly critical memoir, "Domestic Manners of the Americans" (1832).
These historical facts are the basis for White's novel, which presents itself as a posthumously published "biography" of Fanny Wright by Fanny Trollope, with the author's queries to herself left in brackets, much like poet James Merrill's "The (Diblos) Notebook," which includes lines crossed out by a self-editing author-protagonist. However, some basic problems quickly arise in White's conceit. First of all, "Fanny" is not constructed like a biography at all, but like a travel narrative, as shapeless and lacking momentum as an earlier White title, "States of Desire: Travels in Gay America." The narrator, Fanny Trollope, often rings false as a character. She repeatedly describes herself as ugly, "a funny little snaggle-toothed old woman," in a way that few real women would. She states that she identifies with Shakespeare's Falstaff, unlikely in a 19th-century matron but more believable of White himself, who like the critic Harold Bloom combines literary celebrity with physical heft. Fanny Trollope is also given a totally fictitious and unbelievable love affair with an African-American slave, described in prose that descends to the "Mandingo" level: "biceps round and black as cannonballs, a furry chest thick with muscle."
