Although taking place two decades after Mansfield Park (1814), the plot of Love in “the World” has similarities to Jane Austen's novel. However, the background circumstances of Love in “the World”, which seem likely to form part of the excised quarter of the Volume I manuscript, have to be concluded from the extant text. Like Mansfield Park, the key extended family in Love in “the World” involves a trio of siblings. As with Austen's Ward sisters, the marital fortunes of Sir William, George and Gertrude Marwood are very different. Sir William inherits his family's estate in England, where he settles down into married life. One plausible back-story for George Marwood is that after joining the Royal Navy he is promoted to the rank of Captain and meets the widowed Madame (or Mrs) de Fleury, who has a daughter, Alixe. The de Fleurys are known to have been among French emigrants to Canada in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. So it is at least plausible that Alixe's grandparents were also included with the thousands of French Canadians deported by the British from New France to Louisiana in the later eighteenth century. Many of these people were merchants engaged in the lucrative fur trade and other enterprises. The story's chronology suggests that Alixe was born in 1807–1808, which raises the possibility that her biological father, de Fleury, died or was separated from her mother during the War of 1812, and that her widowed mother soon afterwards decamped and possibly married Captain Marwood. Such a hypothetical back-story could explain why Alixe is an heiress and why she retained her mother's de Fleury family name. She does not mention any biological father but may have been too young at the time to remember him. In Lost and Saved, Captain Brooke is also married abroad to a widow with a young daughter. And Norton is known to have had an interest in American history, having as a child written a long poem “whose scene is laid in America, an early instance of that constant interest and liking for persons and things beyond the Atlantic which we find in her to the end of her life.” Meanwhile, Gertrude has married St Clair, a titled gentleman holding a position in the Caribbean, where the couple live and have a son, Charles.