Fanny Herself (The Modern Jewish Experience)

Born in Kalamazoo, MI, Ferber (1885-1968) moved with her family to Chicago and Iowa before settling in Appleton, WI at age 12. After graduating from high school, she was a reporter on the Appleton Daily Crescent and later the Milwaukee Journal before publishing her first novel. Fanny Herself, a story of a young girl coming of age in Appleton at the turn of the 20th century, is generally considered to have been based on Ferber’s own experiences. Regarded by many as the “greatest American woman novelist of her day,” Ferber would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1925 for So Big. She was also the author of Showboat and Cimarron, which along with other of her later works were successfully adapted for stage and screen. Three of her books were developed into musicals. Fanny Brandeis, like Miss Ferber’s Emma McChesney, was a successful business woman. Her mother, Molly Brandeis, who, after her husband’s death, ran Brandeis’ Bazaar in the little middle western town of Winnebago, was also a good business woman, but she died of pneumonia, brought on by overwork, when Fanny was twenty-four. Then Fanny, swayed by “a bitter sorrow, and ambition, and resentment” made up her mind to crush out sympathy and unselfishness and the artistic impulse in herself, and to mold herself into “a hard, keen-eyed resolute woman, whose godhead was to be success, and to whom success would mean money and position.” She went to work in the Haynes-Cooper mall order house, where she made good, and in a few years was earning her $10,000. Then she had to choose between a still greater business success with Michael Fenger, former manager of the Haynes-Cooper concern, and a chance to develop her talent as a cartoonist and to marry Clarence Heyl, who had loved her for years, and who did not see the real values of life in terms of cash. Other characters are Father Fitzpatrick, the Catholic priest in Winnebago; Ella Monahan, buyer for the glove department of Haynes-Cooper; and Fanny’s brother, Theodore, the young violinist, to secure whose musical education Mrs. Brandeis and her daughter had made such sacrifices. Emma McChesney also plays a very slight part in the story. – Book Review Digest