Fanny
Frances Trollope, mother of the novelist Anthony Trollope, was a writer herself--a hack who wrote strictly for money, and whose most famous book was DOMESTIC MANNERS OF THE AMERICANS, which was not exactly a rave review of the country where she spent four years in the 1830s trying to make her fortune. In this novel, Frances (nicknamed Fanny) is writing a biography of a friend of hers--another Fanny, a wealthy woman with a radical utopian social agenda and a tendency toward affairs with famous men, Lafayette and Jefferson among them. As Fanny T. writes about the increasingly destructive and oblivious Fanny W., her narrative turns more and more inward, until in the end her biography becomes the self-revealing story of an original and determined character--herself.

more details ...