The title may smack of an Erica Jong novel, but this is a biography of the courageous and tender woman best remembered as mother of 19th-century novelist Anthony Trollope. Fanny Trollope herself was a bestselling author of six travel books and 35 novels. She was a contemporary of Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and Robert and Elizabeth Browning, among others. She wrote for money, according to Neville-Sington, because her husband’s failing efforts at law and agriculture cast her as the breadwinner of the family. Born in 1779, Fanny didn—t marry until she was 29; she had six children within the next nine years. When her son Arthur and her father died within months of each other, and her marriage began unraveling from the impact of her husband’s erratic and angry moods, Fanny packed up three children and set off for America, where she experimented with a series of businesses, including a wax works. Returning to England, she wrote a book about her experiences (Domestic Manners of the Americans, for a recent edition of which Neville- Sington has written an introduction), her first bestseller. For the next decade, she struggled against debt and more tragedy: a son, her husband, and her younger daughter died in rapid succession. Still, she continued to turn out increasingly popular novels and travel books, waking before dawn to write. Her fiction included both novels of manners and attacks against social ills (slavery, child labor). Critics considered her sharp and funny (—her vulgarity is sublime,— wrote one). Sons Tom and Anthony both became writers, with Anthony, of course, surpassing his mother in reputation. Fanny died in Italy at 84, her last book published only a few years earlier. The author borrows heavily from both Fanny and Anthony’s novels to flesh out the contours of their lives. Fanny’s humor, warmth, and adventurous spirit are evident in all her writing, be it fiction or a thank-you note. (illustrations and photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 30, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-85905-2
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
Smart hopes that sharing her story might help heal the scars of others, though the book is focused on what she suffered...
The inspirational and ultimately redemptive story of a teenage girl’s descent into hell, framed as a parable of faith.
The disappearance of 14-year-old Elizabeth Smart in 2002 made national headlines, turning an entire country into a search party; it seemed like something of a miracle when she reappeared, rescued almost by happenstance, nine months later. As the author suggests, it was something of a mystery that her ordeal lasted that long, since there were many times when she was close to being discovered. Her captors, a self-proclaimed religious prophet whose sacraments included alcohol, pornography and promiscuous sex, and his wife and accomplice, jealous of this “second wife” he had taken, weren’t exactly criminal masterminds. In fact, his master plan was for similar kidnappings to give him seven wives in all, though Elizabeth’s abduction was the only successful one. She didn’t write her account for another nine years, at which point she had a more mature perspective on the ordeal, and with what one suspects was considerable assistance from co-author Stewart, who helps frame her story and fill in some gaps. Though the account thankfully spares readers the graphic details, Smart tells of the abuse and degradation she suffered, of the fear for her family’s safety that kept her from escaping and of the faith that fueled her determination to survive. “Anyone who suggests that I became a victim of Stockholm syndrome by developing any feelings of sympathy for my captors simply has no idea what was going on inside my head,” she writes. “I never once—not for a single moment—developed a shred of affection or empathy for either of them….The only thing there ever was was fear.”
Smart hopes that sharing her story might help heal the scars of others, though the book is focused on what she suffered rather than how she recovered.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-250-04015-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
A captivating, redemptive chronicle of a year in which Smith looked intently into the abyss.
This chronicle of a chaotic year filled with deep losses and rich epiphanies finds the writer and performer covering a whole lot of ground.
In terms of the calendar, Smith’s latest memoir has a tighter focus than its predecessors, M Train (2015) and Just Kids (2010), which won the National Book Award. The titular year is 2016, a year that would begin just after the author turned 69 and end with her turning 70. That year, Smith endured the death of her beloved friend Sandy Pearlman, the music producer and manager with whom she would “have coffee at Caffé Trieste, peruse the shelves of City Lights Bookstore and drive back and forth across the Golden Gate listening to the Doors and Wagner and the Grateful Dead”; and the decline of her lifelong friend and kindred spirit Sam Shepard. She held vigil for Pearlman at his hospital deathbed, and she helped Shepard revise his final manuscript, taking dictation when he could no longer type. Throughout, the author ponders time and mortality—no surprise considering her milestone birthday and the experience of losing friends who have meant so much to her. She stresses the importance of memory and the timeless nature of a person’s spirit (her late husband remains very much alive in these pages as well). Seeing her own reflection, she thinks, “I noticed I looked young and old simultaneously.” She refers to herself as the “poet detective,” and this particular year set her on a quixotic quest, with a mysterious companion unexpectedly reappearing amid a backdrop of rock touring, lecture touring, vagabond traveling, and a poisonous political landscape. “I was still moving within an atmosphere of artificial brightness with corrosive edges,” she writes, “the hyperreality of a polarizing pre-election mudslide, an avalanche of toxicity infiltrating every outpost.”
A captivating, redemptive chronicle of a year in which Smith looked intently into the abyss.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-65768-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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