'The Wanderer ' Summary

The Wanderer opens with a group of people fleeing the Terror. Among them is the protagonist, who refuses to identify herself. No one can place her socially—even her nationality and race are in doubt. As Burney scholar Margaret Doody explains, "the heroine thus arrives [in England] as a nameless Everywoman: both black and white, both Eastern and Western, both high and low, both English and French." She asks for help from the group, but because she knows no one, she is refused.

The protagonist, later identified as Juliet Granville, tries to become self-sufficient, but her story reveals the “difficulties” of a woman in her friendless situation. Women take advantage of her economically and men importune her. She is “a woman totally dispossessed by political events”. Miss Arbe, for example, takes control of Juliet's life and her money (although inexpertly); she also attempts to organise a ladies committee, becoming "a comic spectacle of political life". Specifically, Burney compares Miss Arbe to Robespierre: as Doody explains, "the arrangements of both become swallowed in egotism, are highly disorganized if impetuously directed, and are bound to end in failure". Throughout The Wanderer, Burney comments on the tyrannical hold that the rich have over the poor in England, showing how the wealthy will accept music lessons from Juliet but refuse to pay for them, placing her in a desperate situation. She also charts the downward spiral of Juliet from gentility to working woman; she begins as a musician and slips into the less-reputable positions of milliner and seamstress. In her cross-class analysis of the problems of women, Burney was probably influenced by Mary Wollstonecraft's Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman (1798). However, according to Doody, "Burney is the first novelist seriously to express sympathy for the working women in their normal conditions of work—and to see how the system of employment, not merely individual bad employers, creates conditions of impossible monotony."