biography
| name: |
Wright, Fanny
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popular name of Frances Wright, married name Frances Darusmont
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| sex:
| female
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| lived:
| (1795–1852)
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| biography:
| Abolitionist, social activist, and writer, born in Dundee, E Scotland, UK. Having lost both parents while a child, she was raised by relatives. She read on her own, and by her twenties was writing romantic poetry and plays with progressive themes. In 1818 she went to the USA with a younger sister, and her play Altorf was produced in New York City. When it failed, she travelled throughout the NE and then returned to Britain (1820). Her Views of Society and Manners in America (1821) became one of the best-known traveller's accounts of the day, distinguished by its almost embarrassing praise for everything in the New World. She went to France (1821) and began a somewhat ambiguous relationship with the aging Marquis de Lafayette, almost 40 years her senior, and when he made his famous ‘farewell tour’ of America (1824–5), she followed him around. She remained in the USA and took up the cause of abolishing slavery, purchasing 640 acres near Memphis, TN to set up a plantation, Nashoba, on which she intended to demonstrate a method for liberating slaves. The scheme ended in scandal, but through highly controversial lectures she continued attacking not only slavery but also organized religion and laws forbidding marriage between the races. Although she antagonized most Americans, the freethinking, bold-talking ‘Fanny Wright’ gained the respect of others such as the young Walt Whitman. In 1829 she settled in New York City and had by this time linked up with Robert Dale Owen of the utopian community at New Harmony, IN, and she joined him in publishing the Free Enquirer, in which she promulgated her increasingly more radical views about religion, education, and other social issues. She went off to Paris (1830), married a French doctor and reformer (1831), and in 1835 returned to the USA with him and their child, settling this time in Cincinnati, OH, but continuing to lecture until 1839. In her last book, England, the Civilizer (1848), she called for a sort of united nations that would impose peace on the world; in its vague theorizing, it was an instance of the idealism and impracticality that characterized much of her life and work. |
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