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5.0 out of 5 stars
Fanny Wright, "a blazing, ten log fire sans firescreen.", Mar 15 2004
In this ambiguously entitled novel, Fanny Trollope, writer and mother of Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope, looks back almost thirty years to the late 1820s and her friendship with the notorious Fanny Wright, a utopian visionary who was the first woman to speak publicly as an abolitionist, the first leader of the first labor party, and a radical journalist. In this unfinished (imaginary) biography of the now almost-forgotten Fanny Wright, Fanny Trollope uses flashbacks to explain Wright's development as a firebrand, her association with the intellectual leaders of the day, and the friendship between the two women.Wright spent much time traveling the "paradise" of the United States, while the financially struggling Fanny Trollope remained in London and Paris, where she met Stendahl, Prosper Merimee, Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, William Cullen Bryant, and eventually the revered Marquis de Lafayette. Fanny Wright and Lafayette had toured the United States together, and biographer Trollope records for posterity their travels and their meetings--with Thomas Jefferson about slavery, with Charles Bonaparte about the "atheistic, utopian, communistic society [of] Robert Owen," and with representatives of the Haitian government about a possible homeland for freed slaves. When Wright recruits Fanny Trollope to help her promote a 2000-acre colony called Nashoba, near Memphis, the relationship between Wright and Trollope (who brings three of her children with her) comes to life. Wright intends "to liberate the Negro" and to show that "white men and women can live together without God, money, marriage, or even occupation" in an idyllic community, but Fanny Trollope is shocked by the reality of the Nashoba "utopia" on her arrival. She notes "the general slovenliness of the people" and the poverty all along the Mississippi, and comments that she has to lift her skirts to avoid tobacco juice in public places throughout the US. She is horrified that in Robert Owen's New Harmony, small children see their parents only once or twice a year and that many newcomers are freeloaders with no motivation to work. As the two women and children travel throughout the country, the reader observes their increasingly fragile relationship. Trollope sees life whole, while Wright sees life in ideal terms, failing to recognize people as individuals while setting goals for humanity in general. Trollope is vividly drawn--resourceful, practical, and instinctively warm--while Wright, the subject of the biography, remains, unfortunately, aloof. Filled with the intellectual, social, and philosophical debates of mid-nineteenth century Europe and the United States, this novel is a fascinating study of two thoughtful, intelligent women who tried to make a difference. Mary Whipple
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