Under British Eyes

...Fanny Trollope quickly moved on to the nascent community of Cincinnati, where she made quite a mark, before retreating back to England, by building a very bizarre bazaar and bankrupting the Trollope family...

...Readers on both sides of the Atlantic heaped opprobrium on her when the book appeared in 1832, but Mark Twain later came down squarely in her favor...

...Toward the end of her book on the United States, Fanny had mentioned slavery, which she found shocking and repugnant, predicting its complete disappearance in the not-too-distant future...

...Nashoba was a complete disaster in every possible way for Fanny Trollope and her children...

...Fanny Wright made her first trip to America in 1818 at age twenty-three— and, like nearly every British traveler, she promptly produced a book of her impressions: Views of Society and Manners in America in a series of letters from that country during the years, 1818, 1819, Cynthia Grenier is a writer in Washington, D.C...

...Trollope spoke of this civilization in plain terms—plain and unsugared, but honest and without malice, and without hate...

...I shared Frances Wright's bedroom...

...It had no ceiling, and the floor consisted of planks laid loosely upon piles...

...She purchased a plantation called "Nashoba," thirteen miles south of the Mississippi River at the old Indian trading post of Chickasaw Bluffs (today's Memphis), and set to work...

...He wrote: "Of all those tourists I like Dame Trollope best...

...Wheaten bread they used very sparingly and the Indian corn bread was uneatable...

...In the "acknowledgments," the author admits that much of his book relies on "invention"—Mrs...

...White rather thinks she did...

...and which you would not have regarded as a civilization at all...

...Visiting England again in 1827, Fanny Wright met Fanny Trollope— and somehow convinced her to come join the wondrous world-transforming experiment, bringing along one son and three young daughters, leaving behind her husband and the two oldest sons in school at Winchester...

...She endeavored to get the aged General Lafayette to adopt her and her younger sister (the general's family resisted the maneuver, although he continued to address her in letters as "my dear daughter"), and wangled an invitation through him to Monticello and a meeting with the eighty-two-year-old Thomas Jefferson...

...BY CYNTHIA GRENIER Fanny Trollope, mother of the great Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope, was a prodigious author—in quantity if not quality...

...It also allows him to make free use of the two women's none-too-flattering comments on our early fellow citizens, particularly reflections on racism and materialism...

...After meeting Owen, she became enamored of the idea of using the New Harmony model as a way to prepare slaves for freedom...

...The material has also served Edmund White splendidly for his novel, allowing him, in the persona of Fanny Trollope, to speculate on such details as whether Fanny Wright had actually had an affair with Lafayette...

...What would the tart (as in acidic) Fanny Trollope have to say about the tart (as in a trollop) Fanny Wright...

...Born in 1780 and living till 1863, she wrote in her long lifetime some 41 works of fiction and non-fiction, the best remembered being her Domestic Manners of Americans, still in print today...

...They had no vegetables but rice and a few potatoes we brought with us, no meat but pork, no butter, no cheese...

...It was on this trip that she became acquainted with the English philanthropist and experimenter in social reform Robert Owen, who had bought outright the whole village community of New Harmony—a religious society, entirely communistic in principle and practice—on the banks of the Wabash in Indiana, where he confidently planned to transform society into an uplifting communal way of life...

...White's novel Fanny is, on the whole, a thoroughly engaging read...

...and 1820, by an Englishwoman, which had a surprisingly large sale on both sides of the Atlantic and was translated into several European languages...

...There was another Fanny to reckon with in those days: Frances Wright, a young Scottish heiress and something of a gerontophile groupie...

...Now the writer Edmund White has taken these two Fannys and thrown them together in his new novel, Fanny: A Fiction...

...She found on her arrival the people "were without milk, without beverage of any kind except rain water...

...Suppose one Fanny were to have written a biography of the other...

...Trollope's passionate relations with the powerful blacksmith slave Cudjo, for example, and the sexual proclivities of the young French artist Auguste Hervieu, involving young Henry Trollope—some of which is less than convincing...

...Still, her sojourn in the United States gave Fanny Trollope dandy material for her bestselling work on America and its citizenry...

...In fact, in 1824 Fanny Wright embarked, with her younger sister in tow, to the States once again, this time to partake in some of the glory being accorded to Lafayette on his first triumphal tour of a grateful United States...

...She found a 'civilization' here which you, reader, could not have endured...

...Still, Fanny will have done an admirable job if it sends readers back to the original works of these two clever, witty Fannys, discoursing on the United States in its infant days...

...It's a clever enough idea...

...What would the book look like...