Susan Edmonstone Ferrier is better known to-day as the friend of Scott, and an occasional visitor at Abbotsford, than as a successful novelist. She was born at Edinburgh in 1782, where her father, James Ferrier, was Writer to the Signet, and at one time Clerk of Session, Scott being one of his colleagues. That great genius was one of the earliest to appreciate the excellence of her descriptions of Scottish life given in her first book, entitled Marriage, published anonymously in 1818. In the conclusion of the Tales of my Landlord he paid the unknown writer this graceful tribute:
"There remains behind not only a large harvest, but labourers capable of gathering it in; more than one writer has of late displayed talents of this description, and if the present author, himself a phantom, may be permitted to distinguish a brother, or perhaps a sister, shadow, he would mention in particular the author of the very lively work entitled Marriage."
Miss Ferrier wrote but three novels, Marriage, The Inheritance, and Destiny, a period of six years intervening between the appearance of each of them. Like Miss Burney and Miss Edgeworth she depicts two grades of society. She shows forth the fashionable life of Edinburgh and London, and the cruder mode of living found in the Scottish Highlands. But between her and her models there is the great difference of genius and talent. They passed what they had seen through the alembic of imagination; she has depicted what she saw with the faithfulness of the camera, and the crude realism of these scenes does not always blend with the warp and woof of the story.
Like Miss Edgeworth, Miss Ferrier had a moral to work out. She treats society as a satirist, and lays bare its heartlessness, and the unhappiness of its members who to escape ennui are led hither and thither by the caprice of the moment. While she may present one side of the picture, one hesitates to accept Lady Juliana, Mrs. St. Clair, or Lady Elizabeth as common types of a London drawing-room.
Her plots as well as her characters suffer from this conscious attempt to teach the happiness that must follow the practice of the Christian virtues. In Marriage there are two complete stories. Lady Juliana is the heroine of the first part; her two daughters, who are born in the first half, supplant their mother as heroines of the second half. The plot of Destiny is not much better. The denouement is tame, and the characters lack consistency. The Inheritance has the strongest plot of the three; but Mrs. St. Clair and her secret interviews with the monstrosity Lewiston, who, by the way, has the honour to be an American, throw an air of unreality over a story in many respects intensely real. In this story, as in so many old novels, the nurse's daughter had been brought up as the rightful heiress. The scene in which she tells her betrothed lover, the heir of the estate, the story of her birth, which she had just learned, is said to have suggested to Tennyson the beautiful ballad of Lady Clare.
But when Miss Ferrier sees loom in imagination the sombre purple hills of the Highlands, with the black tarns in the hollows half-hidden in mist, her genius awakes. If she had devoted herself to these people and this region, and ignored the fashionable life of the cities, she might have written a book worthy to be placed beside the best of Miss Edgeworth or Miss Mitford. At the time she wrote, the Highland chief no longer summoned his clan about him at a blast from his bugle, but he had lost little of his old-time picturesqueness. The opening of Destiny describes the wealth of the chief of Glenroy:
"All the world knows that there is nothing on earth to be compared to a Highland chief. He has his loch and his islands, his mountains and his castle, his piper and his tartan, his forests and his deer, his thousands of acres of untrodden heath, and his tens of thousands of black-faced sheep, and his bands of bonneted clansmen, with claymores and Gaelic, and hot blood and dirks."
But Miss Ferrier also depicted a more sordid type of Highlander. Christopher North in his Noctes Ambrosianæ writes of her novels:
"They are the works of a very clever woman, sir, and they have one feature of true and melancholy interest quite peculiar to themselves. It is in them alone that the ultimate breaking-down and debasement of the Highland character has been depicted. Sir Walter Scott had fixed the enamel of genius over the last fitful gleams of their half-savage chivalry, but a humbler and sadder scene—the age of lucre-banished clans,—of chieftains dwindled into imitation squires, and of chiefs content to barter the recollections of a thousand years for a few gaudy seasons of Almacks and Crockfords, the euthanasia of kilted aldermen and steamboat pibrochs, was reserved for Miss Ferrier."
Besides her descriptions of the Highlands, Miss Ferrier has drawn several Scotch characters that deserve to live. What a delightful group is described in Marriage, consisting of the three Misses Douglas, known as "The girls," and their friend Mrs. Maclaughlan! Miss Jacky Douglas, the senior of the trio, "was reckoned a woman of sense"; Miss Grizzy was distinguished by her good-nature and the entanglement of her thoughts; and it was said that Miss Nicky was "not wanting for sense either"; while their friend Lady Maclaughlan loved and tyrannised over all three of them. Sir Walter Scott admired the character of Miss Becky Duguid, a poor old maid, who "was expected to attend all accouchements, christenings, deaths, chestings, and burials, but she was seldom asked to a marriage, and never to any party of pleasure." Joanna Baillie thought the loud-spoken minister, M'Dow, a true representative of a few of the Scotch clergy whose only aim is preferment and good cheer. But none of her other characters can compare with the devoted Mrs. Molly Macaulay, the friend of the Chief of Glenroy in Destiny. When Glenroy has an attack of palsy, she hurries to him, and when she is told that he has missed her, she exclaims with perfect self-forgetfulness: