Ferrier, Susan Edmonstone (1782–1854)

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Ferrier, Susan Edmonstone (1782–1854)

Scottish novelist. Born Susan Edmonstone Ferrier in Edinburgh, Scotland, on September 7, 1782; died on November 5, 1854, in Edinburgh; youngest of ten children of James Ferrier (a solicitor as well as agent and friend of the fifth duke of Argyll) and Helen Coutts; aunt to James Frederick Ferrier, a Scottish philosopher; never married; no children.

A bright child, given a solid education, Susan Ferrier was the daughter of James Ferrier, for some years factor to the duke of Argyll, and at one time one of the clerks of the court of session with Sir Walter Scott. Her mother was Helen Coutts , the beautiful daughter of a For-farshire farmer. Susan was often a visitor to Inverary, the castle of the dukes of Argyll. While there, encouraged by the author Lady Charlotte Bury , she began a satirical work of manners with the help of the duke's niece, Charlotte Clavering . The resulting novel Marriage (written around 1810), for which Clavering only wrote a few pages, was published anonymously in 1818. It portrayed far too many people of Edinburgh society for Ferrier to sign her name to it; many thought Sir Walter Scott had written it.

A woman of quick wit and warm heart, Ferrier was an intimate friend of Scott's as well as other eminent writers of her day, including Joanna Baillie . Scott gave Ferrier a high place among the novelists of her time. In his diary entry of March 27, 1826, criticizing a new work that he had been reading, he wrote, "The women do this better. [Maria ] Edgeworth , Ferrier, [Jane ] Austen , have all given portraits of real society far superior to anything man, vain man, has produced of the like nature." In the conclusion of his Tales of My Landlord, Scott called Ferrier his "sister shadow."

Ferrier wrote three unsigned novels: Marriage (1818), The Inheritance (1824), and Destiny (1831), the last of which was dedicated to Scott who had engineered the deal with the publisher Robert Cadell. All these novels, though slim in plot, present lively pictures of Scottish life and character, written in clear, brisk English, with a keen sense of the ludicrous. Known as neither moralist nor cynic, Ferrier employed a wit that, though caustic, was not insensitive. Her novels portrayed the eccentricities and foibles of her society via strong characterizations like that of the Reverend Mr. M'dow in Destiny:

The Reverend Duncan M'dow was a large, loud-spoken, splayfootedman, whose chief characteristics were his bad preaching, his love of eating, his rapacity for augmentations (or as he termed it ougmentations), and a want of tact in all bienséances of life which would have driven Lord Chesterfield frantic.… [T]he inward man was very much of the same stamp. Mr. M'dow's principal object in this world was self, and his constant and habitual thoughts had naturally operated on his outward manners to such a degree as to blunt all the nicer perceptions of human nature, and render him in very truth his own microcosm. He was no dissembler; for a selfish dissembler is aware that in order to please, one must appear to think of others and forget self. This fictitious politeness he had neither the tact to acquire nor the cunning to feign; consequently he was devoid of all means of pleasing. Not that we mean to recommend dissimulation, or to insinuate that Mr. M'dow would in reality have been a better man had he been able and willing to form himself on the model of the Chesterfield school. He would merely have been less offensive.…

Because these works were issued anonymously, there were many conjectures about their authorship. James Hogg, in the Noctes Ambrosianae (November 1826), mentioned The Inheritance "which aye thought was written by Sir Walter, as weel's Marriage, till it spunked out that it was written by a leddy."

Though her novels were enormously popular, Ferrier did not relish the fame that came with professional writing. This notoriety, combined with dimming eyesight, a tendency to seek seclusion, and a growing religious preoccupation, caused her output to dwindle.

From the time of her mother's death in 1797, she kept house for her father until he died in 1829. For more than 20 years after her last work was published, she lived quietly at Morningside House and in Edinburgh. John Gibson Lockhart describes her visit to the dying Scott in May 1831 in which Scott talked as brilliantly as ever but sometimes, before he arrived at the point in a narrative, "it would seem as if some internal spring had given way." As he paused, he would gaze blankly and anxiously around him. "I noticed," remarked Lockhart, "the delicacy of Miss Ferrier on such occasions. Her sight was bad, and she took care not to use her glasses when he was speaking; and she affected to be also troubled with deafness, and would say, 'Well, I am getting as dull as a post; I have not heard a word since you said so-and-so,'—being sure to mention a circumstance behind that at which he had really halted. He then took up the thread with his habitual smile of courtesy—as if forgetting his case entirely in the consideration of the lady's infirmity."

It was not until a few years before her death on November 5, 1854, at her brother's house in Edinburgh, that Ferrier allowed her name on the title page of any of her novels. Among the papers she left behind was a short, unpublished article, "Recollections of Visits to Ashestiel and Abbotsford," her own account of her long friendship with Scott which contains some impromptu verses Scott wrote in her album at Ashestiel. Ferrier's complete works were published in 1882. Her letters to her sister were destroyed at Ferrier's request. In 1898, however, a volume of her correspondence with a memoir by her grandnephew, John Ferrier, was published.