Fanny Herself

Fanny Herself
Edna Ferber

TO WILLIAM ALLEN WHITE
PREFACE
It 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.

FANNY HERSELF

CHAPTER ONE
You could not have lived a week in Winnebago without being aware of
Mrs. Brandeis. In a town of ten thousand, where every one was a
personality, from Hen Cody, the drayman, in blue overalls (magically
transformed on Sunday mornings into a suave black-broadcloth usher
at the Congregational Church), to A. J. Dawes, who owned the
waterworks before the city bought it. Mrs. Brandeis was a
super-personality. Winnebago did not know it. Winnebago, buying its
dolls, and china, and Battenberg braid and tinware and toys of Mrs.
Brandeis, of Brandeis' Bazaar, realized vaguely that here was some one
different.
When you entered the long, cool, narrow store on Elm Street, Mrs.
Brandeis herself came forward to serve you, unless she already was
busy with two customers. There were two clerks--three, if you count
Aloysius, the boy--but to Mrs. Brandeis belonged the privilege of
docketing you first. If you happened in during a moment of business
lull, you were likely to find her reading in the left-hand corner at the

front of the store, near the shelf where were ranged the dolls' heads, the
pens, the pencils, and school supplies.
You saw a sturdy, well-set-up, alert woman, of the kind that looks taller
than she really is; a woman with a long, straight, clever nose that
indexed her character, as did everything about her, from her crisp,
vigorous, abundant hair to the way she came down hard on her heels in
walking. She was what might be called a very definite person. But first
you remarked her eyes. Will you concede that eyes can be piercing, yet
velvety? Their piercingness was a mental quality, I suppose, and the
velvety softness a physical one. One could only think, somehow, of
wild pansies--the brown kind. If Winnebago had taken the trouble to
glance at the title of the book she laid face down on the pencil boxes as
you entered, it would have learned that the book was one of Balzac's, or,
perhaps, Zangwill's, or Zola's. She never could overcome that habit of
snatching a chapter here and there during dull moments. She was too
tired to read when night came.
There were many times when the little Wisconsin town lay broiling in
the August sun, or locked in the January drifts, and the main business
street was as silent as that of a deserted village.