Scottish Authors > Susan Edmonstone Ferrier Novelist 1782-1854

Susan Ferrier was born in Edinburgh on 17th September 1782, daughter of Helen Coutts and James Ferrier, a Writer to the Signet. As a child, Ferrier accompanied her father to Inveraray Castle, Loch Fyne whenever his business as manager of the estates of the fifth Duke of Argyll took him north. These trips across the Highland line gave Ferrier the setting for her novels and two important friends: Lady Charlotte Campbell, the Duke's younger daughter and Charlotte Clavering, the Duke's niece. After her mother's death in 1797, Ferrier assumed full responsibility for household management, looking after her father who lived until 1829. Ferrier did not marry. She enjoyed Edinburgh's polite social life and Walter Scott, whom she knew well and who was a younger colleague of her father's, described her as "Simple, full of humour, and exceedingly ready at repartee, and all this without the least affectation of the bluestocking". In later life, Ferrier underwent evangelical conversion and joined the Free Church. From conviction she gave up writing fiction. Her eyesight was failing and she retired to private life. She died on 5th November 1854 and was buried in St. Cuthbert's Churchyard, Edinburgh.

Scott's comment, and the fact that Ferrier herself gave up writing fiction latterly, show that polite society regarded novel-reading as a frivolous activity and regarded women, including writers, who could distinguish themselves intellectually, as rather off-putting. These social factors were very important in shaping the kind of fiction women wrote. Marriage, Ferrier's first novel, published anonymously in 1818, began as a joint project with Charlotte Clavering. Together they planned a novel which would "warn all young ladies against runaway matches". Ferrier was keen to justify her fiction by expressing responsible moral attitudes. "I expect it will be the first book every wise matron will put into the hand of her daughter," said Ferrier in a letter to Charlotte, embracing a didacticism which specifically countered the commonly-held view that novel-reading would corrupt women. Marriage was well received on publication. Although Charlotte did contribute a short section, she withdrew from the project and Ferrier herself completed the novel, which though didactic was also full of satire, humour and caricature. Lady Juliana elopes with a dashing Scots captain, Henry Douglas, to his Highland castle, Glenfern, where Juliana's life becomes more and more bewildering as she is exposed to a completely different culture. Unlike Scott's Romantic Highlands, Ferrier's can be coarse, poor and uncivilised, though she does admire the sturdy independence of character she finds there: Lady MacLaughlan is robust in speech and character and essentially good-hearted. Ferrier's didacticism and her ability to create strong women characters are echoed in the fiction of her contemporary Mary Brunton (1778-1818).

Ferrier wrote two subsequent novels, The Inheritance (1824) and Destiny (1831). The opening of The Inheritance echoes the opening of Jane Austen's Pride and prejudice. Although Ferrier is sometimes compared with Austen they take different approaches - Ferrier, a bold satirist; Austen, a sophisticated ironist. In her brilliant caricatures Ferrier is probably closer in spirit to Tobias Smollet, an earlier Scottish writer of satirical novels.

Beth Dickson

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