The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Fanny: A Fiction, by Edmund White
reviewed by David Bergman

Edmund White. Fanny: A Fiction. Ecco, 2003. 369 pp. $24.95.

Fanny is an extraordinary break from Edmund White’s previous work. It purports to be the final book by the prolific Victorian writer Francis Trollope, the uncompleted biography of her friend Francis Wright, a freethinking feminist who attempted to create a utopian community in the antebellum South. We follow these two extraordinary women from the beginning of their friendship in early-nineteenth-century London, through their visits with Lafayette, to their ill-fated journeys up the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers—with a long stopover in Cincinnati, White’s birthplace—and side trips to Haiti and Italy. Yet despite being a comic, historical novel with a female narrator, Fanny maintains a clear connection to White’s long-standing preoccupations. White has always played with a campy humor, even when it was difficult to distinguish from his lyricism. But it is Wright, and especially Trollope, who are most familiar. They emerge as rebels against a social order that would constrain them, survivors in a world that would destroy them, and lovers—but not of each other—in a world that would keep them from sexual fulfillment. They succeed because of their wit, their intelligence, their “gumption,” as well as their well-developed ability to ignore whatever truths get in their way. Thus the two Fannys are much like the characters of White’s trilogy of autobiographical novels. Indeed, the book harkens back to White’s earliest work, his play Blue Boy in Black, which told the tale of an indomitable black maid in the home of a successful writer who, after breaking up her employer’s marriage, seducing him, and becoming his second wife, launches her own literary career. Fanny, like Blue Boy in Black, is a darkly comic work about race in America and about the kind of ruthless willpower necessary to prevail against the forces arrayed against those who are black, female, or gay.