Fanny is the fictionalized autobiography of Louis Dantin, the "nom de plume" of author Eugene Seers. Two great upheavals shape the character's life -- he leaves the priesthood and exiles himself to the United States, working for many years in the printing shop of the Harvard University Press. There he marries a black woman, cutting himself off doubly, according to the standards of his day -- from the conservative community in which he was raised and from the race-conscious one in which he lives. Fanny deals with these exceedingly intimate, painful and bittersweet years of his life which he devotes unremittingly to writing and criticism.