Fanny - Edmund White

In her fifties Fanny Trollope, mother of the novelist Anthony, became famous overnight for her book attacking the United States. Now, twenty-five years later, she sharpens her pen for her most controversial work yet: the biography of her old friend Frances Wright, the Scottish radical and feminist. Back in the 1820s the young Fanny Wright erupted into the Trollopes' sleepy English cottage like a volcano, her talk aflame with utopian ideals. Before long, Wright had convinced the older woman to follow her to America - a journey of extreme penury, frontier hardships and the most satisfying (and surprising) sensual romance of Fanny Trollope's life. The 'biography soon degenerates into a settling of scores with Fanny Wright and wild digressions on the misadventures of Mrs Trollope's own family.

Edmund White was born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1940. His fiction includes the autobiographical sequence A Boy's Own Story, The Beautiful Room is Empty and The Farewell Symphony, as well as Caracole, Forgetting Elena, Noctunes for the King of Naples, and Skinned Alive, a collection of short stories. He is also the author of a highly acclaimed biography of Jean Genet, a short study of Proust, a travel book about America - States of Desire - and of Sketches from Memory, with Hubert Sorin. He is an officer of the Ordre des Arts et Lettres.

Wonderfully eccentric...Never less than convincing...Brilliant
Daily Mail

Bold and brilliant...Instructive, provocative, funny, poignant and timely...Combines such exuberant invention with such informed historical insight
Guardian