Frances Burney's the Wanderer, Jane Austen's Persuasion, and the Cancelled Chapters

WHY DID JANE AUSTEN discard her original ending to Persuasion (1818)? I suggest that having worked up elements from Frances Burney's The Wanderer within body of novel, she realized that other ideas from Burney were distorting her conclusion. In her rewriting of cancelled chapters, manuscript of her published works to survive, Austen can be seen swerving decisively away from The Wanderer. Such patterns of inspiration, resistance, and creativity are typical of Austen. She especially admired Burney, singling out her novels and Maria Edgeworth's in Northanger Abbey as having only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them (37). If, as I argue elsewhere, reviews of The Wanderer, with their misogynistic rudeness about its sixty-two-year-old author, spurred her into creating a woman who has lost her bloom, Austen's appropriations from novel itself suggest further support and approval. Anne Elliot's and exquisite feelings, concert and umbrella scenes, misunderstanding between Anne and Captain Wentworth, Louisa Musgrove's fall, matters of rank, and debate about relationship between sexes all appear to have been inspired by Burney. But Austen purge other borrowings from her manuscript, such as mockery of an admiral, a heroine's disabling confusion, and a commission in which protagonist has a painful interest. In The Wanderer (1814), a mysterious and penniless stranger calling herself arrives in England from France. Although loved by Albert Harleigh, her secret marriage prevents her from declaring a return. Albert rejects Elinor Joddrel, a fiercely Wollstonecraftian feminist who dresses as a man, and Elinor threatens suicide. After many vicissitudes, Ellis proves to be Juliet Greville, with a naval uncle and a guardian to protect her. Her husband's death allows her to marry Harleigh. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Austen's specific plunder from Burney includes Miss Brinville, who seems to have prompted creation of Sir Walter Elliot and his daughters. She is a celebrated beauty, who had wasted her bloom in a perpetual search of admiration; and lost her prime, without suspecting it was gone, in vain and ambitious difficulties of choice. Yet her charms, however faded and changed, still, by candle-light, or when adroitly shaded, through a becoming skill in arrangement of her headdress, appeared nearly in their first lustre, and in this view it was that they were always present to herself; though, by world, altered complexion, sunk eyes, and enlarged features, exhibited by day-light, or by common attire, were all, except through impertinent retrospection, that were any more noticed. (234) Austen need enlarge on Burney's sketch for Elizabeth and Sir Walter: It sometimes happens, that a woman is handsomer at twenty-nine than she was ten years before; and, generally speaking.... it is a time of life at which scarcely any charm is lost. It was so with Elizabeth; still same handsome Miss Elliot that she had begun to be thirteen years ago; and Sir Walter might be excused, therefore, in forgetting her age, or, at least, be deemed half a fool, for thinking himself and Elizabeth as blooming as ever, amidst wreck of good looks of every body else. (6) Where Miss Brinville deludes herself, however, Elizabeth did not quite equal her father in personal contentment (6). Remembering with regrets and apprehensions that thirteen winters and springs have already passed, and that she approaches the years of danger, Elizabeth would have rejoiced to be certain of being properly solicited by baronet-blood within next twelvemonth or two (7). Her disappointment by Mr. Elliot (7) then sets story in motion. Although Miss Brinville's expectations have been similarly disappointed at least fifty times, fallaciousness of self-appreciation, even when self-detected, fails to prevent elastic. …