I can see trying to get to a close relative. I can not see wandering around Europe possibly marrying or not and giving birth to a baby or not and then leaving it.
The whole thing from beginning to end made no sense. Of course it was not a true story and so of course it didn't make sense. I think I would have assumed, if I had survived, that someone in my family would want me to contact them and I would, of course, want to "go home".
I would not have been remote, uncouth, without the manners that I was brought up with. Anastasia may have been an "Imp", but being an Imp in the protected atmosphere of the palace around those who would love and forgive her, is not the same as alienating all who might be able to help a stranded survivor. To me the alienation is what Greg just referred to. A way to keep those who might actually be able to expose her away so that she could pretend to be someone she was not. FS knew that anyone who got too close would find out the truth and expose her for the impostor she was.
I still believe that the real Anastasia would not have devolved into the person that Anna Anderson was. And that is why, no matter what book I have read, I have never been entirely able to buy into AA being AN. Especially after she married Manahan. There was no reason to live in filth and squalor after she had a believing protector in the man she married. That just never made sense and by that time, she had gathered enough information from gossip and magazines and books and hearsay to make the world believe that she was someone she was not.
But what I believed during the last 50 or so years that I have been reading about the Imperial Family and their way of life and their deaths doesn't truly matter. The truth is that AA was not AN and now Greg and Penny have written about it.