Other editions of book Fanny Herself

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

First published in 1917, Fanny Herself is one of Edna Ferber’s semi-autobiographical books recounting her own experiences as a young Jewish girl growing up in a Midwestern town at the end of the 19th century. Ferber is more known to the public for her Pulitzer-winning novel, So Big, for her other successful novel entitled Giant, and for her Cimarron, another novel made into a movie and receiving the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1931, but this book also shows Ferber’s talent as a novelist at its best. Fanny, the protagonist of the novel, is as ambitious and driven towards success as the author herself was. She leaves the town she was born in and settles in the big city. She finds employment as a saleswoman and she works hard to transform the company she was hired by into a solid and thriving business. Her struggles are crowned by success – her determination to prove herself being paired with wits and resourcefulness guarantee that outcome from the beginning. Edna Ferber’s book is a character development novel, one of the best of the kind, but it is also a book about religious tolerance, Jewish culture, the general attitude of the Midwest towards Jews as well as about social issues and economic development. The company Fanny starts working for is a Chicago-based mail order catalog company, a new and modern business that grows rapidly. Fanny also belongs to a new class, that of the independent and ambitious young woman and the author manages to capture the character and to place it organically into social context. The great structure and the well-penned, intriguing characters are teamed with masterful and exciting storytelling and lots of humor, too, making Fanny Herself a captivating read - one that you will want to enjoy in one go, from cover to cover.

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

PREFACEIt has become the fashion among novelists to introduce their hero in knee pants, their heroine in pinafore and pigtails. Time was when we were rushed up to a stalwart young man of twenty-four, who was presented as the pivot about whom the plot would revolve. Now we are led, protesting, up to a grubby urchin of five and are invited to watch him through twenty years of intimate minutiae. In extreme cases we have been obliged to witness his evolution from swaddling clothes to dresses, from dresses to shorts (he is so often English), from shorts to Etons.The thrill we get for our pains is when, at twenty-five, he jumps over the traces and marries the young lady we met in her cradle on page two. The process is known as a psychological study. A publisher's note on page five hundred and seventy-three assures us that the author is now at work on Volume Two, dealing with the hero's adult life. A third volume will present his pleasing senility. The whole is known as a trilogy. If the chief character is of the other sex we are dragged through her dreamy girlhood, or hoydenish. We see her in her graduation white, in her bridal finery. By the time she is twenty we know her better than her mother ever will, and are infinitely more bored by her.Yet who would exchange one page in the life of the boy, David Copperfield, for whole chapters dealing with Trotwood Copperfield, the man? Who would relinquish the button-bursting Peggotty for the saintly Agnes? And that other David—he of the slingshot; one could not love him so well in his psalm-singing days had one not known him first as the gallant, dauntless vanquisher of giants. As for Becky Sharp, with her treachery, her cruelty, her vindicativeness, perhaps we could better have understood and forgiven her had we known her lonely and neglected childhood, with the drunken artist father and her mother, the French opera girl.With which modest preamble you are asked to be patient with Miss Fanny Brandeis, aged thirteen. Not only must you suffer Fanny, but Fanny's mother as well, without whom there could be no understanding Fanny. For that matter, we shouldn't wonder if Mrs. Brandeis were to turn out the heroine in the end. She is that kind of person.