Susan Ferrier
The novels of Susan Edmonstone Ferrier (1782-1854) have been compared to those of her contemporary Jane Austen. Although Ferrier did write novels of manners, her sometimes brutal satire often resembles Frances Burney’s more than it does Austen’s.
Ferrier spent most of her life in Edinburgh, where she was born, and where her father was a clerk of the Court of Sessions. She met Edinburgh’s literary luminaries, including Henry Mackenzie and Walter Scott, but seems to have preferred quiet domesticity and the company of her three married sisters and their families. Ferrier began work on her first novel Marriage (1818) when her friend Charlotte Clavering suggested that they write a novel together. Their styles were simply too different for this arrangement to work, as Ferrier politely deplore Clavering’s melodramatic plots and unrealistic characters. In the end, Clavering contributed a chapter to Marriage recounting the history of Mrs. Douglas, aunt of the protagonist Mary.
Like many women writers of her day, Ferrier chose to publish her novels anonymously, although her publishers were aware of her identity. It wasn’t until Richard Bently’s edition of 1852 that her name appeared on the title pages of her works. Ferrier seems to have felt great ambivalence about writing novels, and even about reading them, declaring in a letter to Clavering that “as the only good purpose of a book is to inculcate morality, and convey some lesson of instruction as well as delight, I do not see that what is called a good moral can be dispensed with in a work of fiction.” Her second and third novels, Inheritance (1824) and Destiny (1831) were progressively less satirical and more straightforwardly didactic.
Ferrier never married and kept house for her father until his death in 1829. Beginning in the early 1830s, she began to suffer excruciating headaches and vision loss, which kept her confined to the house for long stretches. By the time of her death in 1854, she was almost blind. She left the beginning of a fourth novel, “Maplehurst Manor",” unfinished.
Bibliography
Andrew Monnickendam, The Novels of Walter Scott and his Literary Relations: Mary Brunton, Susan Ferrier, and Christian Johnstone (New York: Palgrave 2013).
Pam Perkins, Women Writers and the Edinburgh Enlightenment (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010).
Leah Price, The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel from Richardson to George Eliot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
Juliet Shields, “From Family Roots to the Routes of Empire: National Tales and the Domestication of the Scottish Highlands,” ELH 74.2 (2006), pp. 919-40.
Rivka Swenson, Essential Scots and the Idea of Unionism in Anglo-Scottish Literature, 1603-1832 (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2016).