Mary Struggles On
On November
4, 1827, Mary, now in London, bid farewell to Fanny Wright and Fanny Trollope
who were sailing from Tower Bridge aboard the Edward for America. It took seven weeks to reach the mouth of the
Mississippi River.[1]
It’s not
really all that relevant here, but
Trollope, after staying for a bit at Nashoba, soon soured on the project, which
was nothing like what she had imagined—and hoped—it would be. Her best-selling Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832)
contains a brief account. [O]ne glance,
she writes of Nashoba, sufficed to
convince me that every idea I had formed of the place was as far as possible
from the truth. She goes on to say that she found no beauty in the scenery round Nashoba, nor can I conceive that
it would possess any even in summer.[2]
They didn’t
stay long. Wright abandoned the project, and by January 26, 1828, the two
Fannys were back in Memphis, where they waited a few days before heading to
Cincinnati, nearly 500 miles to the northeast. It took about a month. Trollope
was impressed by Cincinnati’s scenery—the hills, the Ohio River—and she stayed,
trying to make a go of a department store (the Bazaar—it didn’t work out), so
she began writing to support her family, became a best-selling author, soon
surpassed by her far-more-famous son Anthony (who did not go to America with
her), whose forty-seven novels I, caught in his wondrous web, read over a
period of years—July 1997 to October 2007. I’ve rarely had more literary fun.
Fanny
Trollope was back in England in August 1831. She’d been gone nearly four years.
And by the time she had died in 1863, she had written forty books.
And now, at
last (!), let’s dive back into Mary’s story …
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