The original ending of Persuasion and Jane Austen’s writing process

I’ve just read an interesting article about Jane Austen as an elusive figure, and how little we know about her: 
https://lithub.com/the-many-ways-in-which-we-are-wrong-about-jane-austen/ 
Indeed, we know very little about Jane Austen. The only thing I feel I can be sure about is her ethics and views on love and relationships, as evident in her works (and letters), but we don’t know her politics and views on anything else from her novels, which is why she’s claimed by everyone, by all groups of people with opposing views. Her works are so subtle and full of irony that she’s often liked by people she would have detested. We don’t know her views from the letters either—most of them were burnt by Cassandra, Jane’s estimated to have written about 3000 letters, of which about 160 survive. 
Her life too isn’t very clear either—we only have a few facts. 
I myself don’t agree with every single thing in the article. I would hesitate to call Jane Austen a radical or a revolutionary—Helena Kelly sees the characterisation of some hypocritical clergymen in her works as a depiction of a world in which “the Church ignores the needs of the faithful”, whereas I see it as a depiction of hypocrites. The 2 subjects that seem to interest Austen the most, in all of her works, are self-deception and hypocrisy. Also, for a good, honest clergyman as a counterexample, see Edmund Bertram. He has faults, but he’s kind and considerate. 
Her works certainly contain some social criticism, as she’s writing about society as it was. But how critical she was and what changes she wanted is quite a different matter.  
That being said, it’s an interesting article, and a good reminder of how little we actually know about Jane Austen. The part I find most fascinating is about Henry Austen’s untruths and attempts to create a completely false image about her sister: 

“On Henry’s telling, his sister’s books sprang into life fully formed—painlessly, effortlessly. According to him, Jane’s “composition” was “rapid and correct,” a flow of words that “cost her nothing,” washing through her to appear, as “everything” she wrote appeared, “finished from her pen.” We are to imagine no labor, no dedication, no ambition, no intellect or skill, but simply a “gift,” a “genius,” an “intuitive” power of invention. For modern-day readers, schooled in the image of Jane’s near contemporary the Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, hopped up on vast quantities of opium, writing down his famous poem of Xanadu and Kubla Khan while still in an inspired dream, this is an attractive idea. It allows us to imagine Jane’s novels not as pieces of deliberate, considered art but instead as whatever we like—a wrestling with her own repressed desires, a rewriting of her own unhappy love affairs, even an accidental tapping into a wellspring of culture and language. Jane’s novels have been read in all these ways, and others besides.” 

This is wrong. Jane Austen took her writing seriously, worked hard on her novels, and revised them heavily. We might not have Susan (original version of Northanger Abbey) or First Impressions (original version of Pride and Prejudice) or Elinor and Marianne (first draft of Sense and Sensibility, which was in epistolary form), but we have the unfinished The Watsons and Sanditon. Her manuscripts were “dotted with crossings out, additions, and alterations”. 
When we read The Watsons and Sanditon, and in a way, Persuasion, and compare them to her finished works, we can see that Jane Austen was the type of writer who laid out all the facts, completed the story, then came back to revise and add flesh to the skeleton. Reading unfinished works may be unsatisfying, but it sheds some light on the writing process. In Persuasion (the working title was The Elliots), which she wrote during her illness and didn’t see to its publication, there are places where it looks obvious that she meant to fill in later.   
In addition, in the case of Persuasion, she rewrote the ending. 
I might have read the cancelled chapters before and forgotten about them, now I’m surprised. If you haven’t read them, here’s the link: 
https://pemberley.com/janeinfo/pcanchap.html 
(Hint: there’s no letter!). 
The final ending is so much better—longer, more subtle, and much more romantic (see my blog post about the glances in Persuasion). 
To get back to Helena Kelly’s article: 

“Henry’s “Biographical Notice of the Author” appeared in the first, joint edition of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, which was hurried through the printing presses a scant five months after Jane died. The notice is short but crammed with what might politely be called inconsistencies. Having assured his readers that Jane’s novels appeared almost without effort, Henry includes in a postscript a misquotation of Jane’s own famous description of her work as akin to miniature painting—“a little bit of ivory, two inches wide, on which I work with a brush so fine as to produce little effect after much labour.” In the notice, Henry says that Jane never thought of having a book published before Sense and Sensibility, even though he was well aware that Susan/Northanger Abbey had been accepted for publication in 1803.” 

It’s good that her family came out to acknowledge her as the author so far known as “a Lady”, but note that her epitaph made no mention of her writings. 
Personally I find it deeply insulting that Jane Austen in popular culture is often stuck in the image of chicklit, romance, light reading, and comfort reading. A lot of the people who claim to like her say that her books are light, bright, and sparkling, then they get surprised and disappointed when she turns out to be much more serious (the case of Mansfield Park). 
I keep saying these things because, with my other favourite writers such as Tolstoy, Melville, or Flaubert, I don’t have to defend them, I definitely don’t have to say they were serious writers, whereas Jane Austen’s novels can be enjoyed on a superficial level and often invite a superficial reading.  
We don’t need to talk about ideas to talk about her seriousness—I’m more interested in her techniques and innovations. Austen needs to be seen in context—she was doing something different. In the first 3 novels, she was responding to 18th century popular works, parodying the sentimental novel and the Gothic novel, and satirising clichés and hackneyed conventions of the time. When suggested by others to try some other genres, she insisted on going her own way.  
In the last 3 novels, she was responding to herself, in a way—for example, in Mansfield Park, she created a heroine who was the opposite of Elizabeth Bennet from Pride and Prejudice, and an anti-heroine who was very similar to Elizabeth Bennet on the surface; after Fanny Price in Mansfield Park, who judged everything correctly and noticed everything others overlooked, she created Emma Woodhouse in Emma, who misinterpreted everything she saw; after writing about Emma, who tried to be a matchmaker and was therefore the persuader (or dissuader), she wrote Persuasion and created Anne Elliot, who was the persuaded.   
Also in the last 3 novels, she wrote each novel as different from the last as possible, in style and tone—after the light, bright, and sparkling Pride and Prejudice, came the sombre, introspective, and serious Mansfield Park; after Mansfield Park was the relaxed, funny Emma; then after Emma, she wrote Persuasion, which was autumnal, melancholy, romantic, and full of feeling. 
Jane Austen’s often underrated, because her genius is not obvious. She created a distinctive voice for each character. Free indirect discourse may seem commonplace now, but she was among the first practitioners—probably the first English novelist to use it extensively, and she perfected it in Emma.  
Her great works were achieved after much labour—lots of revisions, even if they appear effortless.