Customer Reviews

The Wanderer

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Fanny Burney's _The Wanderer_, her last published book, is the best of all her works. The heroine is easy to love, and only a callous reader could not feel pity for her friendless situation. The basic premise is this: a young, elegant woman of obvious good breeding is suddenly forced to flee France for mysterious reasons. But she has lost all of her possessions during her crossing of the Channel, and she finds herself in England, friendless, penniless, and completely dependant on the charity of those around her. The crux of the novel is how she is able to get by under these circumstances. Her fortitude is uplifting, and her plight shows us the problems women had two centuries ago in merely obtaining a subsistence upon which to live. The plot gets more and more complex as we find out about the life of the Wanderer herself. We don't discover her name for the first time until the middle of the book! _The Wanderer_ is a truly engaging novel, and once read, it becomes clear why Fanny Burney was one of Jane Austen's favorite authors.

"The Wanderer" is a wonderful novel detailing the struggles faced by a single woman in England in the era of the French Revolution, who due to circumstances beyond her control must remain nameless and "family-less" and thus rely on the charity and goodwill of strangers. Readers familar with Jane Austen's writing will recognize a similar style, indeed Fanny Burney was an inspiration to Miss Austen, yet with an even more critical eye turned towards the upper-middle-class social structure.

I found it a little more plodding in parts than "Evelina," my favorite of Burney's novels, as Burney occasionally gets bogged down in minutiae of social interactions, but even those long descriptions give insight into what details would have been considered monstrously important to Burney's contemporary audience.

Regardless, the difficulties faced by the nameless heroine and the mystery of her circumstances are more than enough to engage any fan of 18th and early 19th century literature.

My wife waxed rhapsodic over the prose and poetry inherent in Fanny Burney's neglected classic The Wanderer. The narrativ tells an exciting story of the French Revolution era even though the action occurs mainly in England. The "Incognita" is a fascinating character who moves through English society as a subordinate to the rich and cruel society folk with whom she is forced by circumstances to live. "Miss Ellis endures the slings and arrows of outrageous fortunate to triumph over her enemies at last. Burney's prose is musical and her sentences flow with insight into the human condition. As a friend of Hesther Thrale
she was influenced by that excellent writer. Her father was the famed musician Dr. Charles Burney a close friend of Dr. Johnson. If you want to look at a classic of early feminism and encounter one female difficulty after another this is a good place to begin.
I liked the novel so well I am now engrossed in Burney's second novel "Cecilia" with her first work "Evelina" on my reading list.
Fanny Burney is an excellent new author to explore and be enriched by as you loose yourself in her voluminous pages!
Well recommended!

Amazon.com sells only volume 3 of this 5 volume novel: useless unless you already have volumes 1 and 2 and 4 and 5.

While Burney's work has been immensely popular in academia for the last ten years or so, /The Wanderer/ (1814) still remains in one of the more untouched corners of studies about Burney, and the eighteenth-century and Romantic novel in general. Perhaps it's because the novel was published so much later in her literary career; I think, though, that /The Wanderer/ may also be too much a novel of Romanticism for some readers. That Burney constantly uses gothic tropes and conventions in her early work, though, should not be lost on Burney fans or scholars, nor should the fact that Romantic ideologies in /The Wanderer/ often suffer severe scrutiny from both the narrator and the protagonists. Notions of enlightenment don't necessarily escape Burney's arch critiques, either. Enough with the critical banter, though: what /The Wanderer/ really pares down is the theme Burney so meticulously develops throughout all of her work--the ways in which a female subject copes with and attempts to survive in a patriarchal society. Not able to reveal her name or her connections once on the shores of England, a girl we'll call "Ellis" (because the characters do) has no choice but to try to and find work in a society that gives limited options for women's labor. The options available are less than appealing, and the ways in which many of the characters within the novel view Ellis based on her need to work demonstrates the ways in which a financially and socially independent woman is viscerally judged and isolated.

I have to say that /The Wanderer/ is a wonderful novel in terms of character development. While Ellis is certainly endearing, the anti-heroine, Elinor, is fascinating--and at times horrifying. Burney's critique of a heroine after Wollstonecraft's own heart is riveting, and Elinor's taste for theatrical flourishes and overdramatic displays of gender bending make her one of the more fascinating Burney women to read. I also find Albert Harleigh, the novel's hero, to be one of the more endearing and attractive Burney men. This may be, however, because of the extraordinary situation he is placed in as a man of family and wealth who falls in love with and wishes to pay honorable addresses to a woman whose name and place in society he can't know. The tensions of the French Revolution, its horrors, lurk at the center of this darker novel, as well. Though Ellis believes she has escaped tyranny and injustice when she arrives safely on the banks of England from France, the way others treat her suggests Burney's earnest desire to illustrate how tyranny extends into other tenets of the social landscape--gender and working class ideologies being one of the places in which Britain could stand a bit of Revolution in the late eighteenth-century.

As Burney's last novel, though, I have to say, "Had Burney a hundred novels, ten thousand times she would have conquered them all!" ;)

The version of THE WANDERER being sold is published by General Books, LLC. It is not the version that the good reviews are referring to. The version by General Books, LLC is section 3 only, full of typos and extratanious marks. I have now learned how important it is when reading a review to check that the publication they are referring to is the same one being sold. EVELINA, CECEILA and CAMILLIA by Oxford Classics are wonderful and I give them 5 stars, but this version of THE WANDERED is unreadable.

Well, as with Burney's other novels, don't let the length scare you. The focus of this book is centered on "female difficulties" as the subtitle indicates, rather than a romantic relationship which many Jane Austen fans might be looking for. The romance is definitely there, so don't worry, but the more interesting part of the book is the interplay between one woman, an Incognito, and the people she encounters and must depend on for her survival. The prejudices she encounters and the female snobbery and male disrespect keep the plot relevant to modern readers' interests. It is really a travel/adventure story about a woman who starts out with nothing (in order to hide herself from danger) and runs into various people and mini-plots along the way. There are a few length philosophical debates between some of the characters at some parts of the book, but they don't weigh down the light style of the rest of the novel. This book really made me think about how others perceive a person and how their opinions, unfortunately, are often based solely upon reputation and prejudices.