SOURCE: “Marriage,” in Susan Ferrier, Twayne Publishers, 1984, pp. 40-65.

[In the following essay, Cullinan reads Susan Ferrier's novel as a satiric commentary on the conventions of courtship and marriage.]

THE PLANNING OF MARRIAGE

Susan Ferrier and Charlotte Clavering began to plan a novel in 1809. Their letters form a fascinating study of processes leading from germinal ideas to a published work; they also contain some of the most lighthearted aspects of the relationship between the two young women.

They first conceived of the literary work as a joint effort that would be carried out through their letters and infrequent meetings. Ferrier writes: “Your proposals flatter and delight me, but how, in the name of postage, are we to transport our brains to and fro? I suppose we’d be pawning our flannel petticoats to bring about our heroine's marriage, and lying on straw to give her Christian burial” (MC, [Memoir and Correspondence, edited by John Doyle. London: J. Murray, 1898] 5). It quickly became clear, however, that incompatibility of style and subject was a greater problem than postage. Ferrier enjoyed her friend's penchant for sensationalism, but could not take it seriously:

What a glorious vision [writes Ferrier] burst upon my sight as I beheld our heroine, even the beauteous Herminsilde, sailing over the salt seas in an old beer barrel!!! My dearest of dear creatures, you must excuse me for having skipped over all the dry land and plumped in, heels over head, into the water, since really the barrel is as buoyant in my imagination as erst it was in the Archipelago. Methinks I behold the count and the squire ramming her in like so much raw sugar, and treading her down as the negroes do the figs, to make them pack close! (MC, 84)

Ferrier was equally unwilling to participate in Clavering's other suggested plots, which concerned the adventures of “men of the moon” and a “Hottentot heroine and a wild man of the woods”: “I should despair,” Ferrier admits, “of doing justice to their wild paces and delicate endearments” (MC, 86). In short, Ferrier writes that literary collaboration with her friend would be impossible:

You say there are just two styles for which you have any taste, viz. the horrible and the astonishing! Now I’ll groan for you till the very blood shall curdle in my veins, or I’ll shriek and stare till my own eyes start out of their sockets with surprise—but as to writing with you, in truth it would be as easy to compound a new element out of fire and water, as that we two should jointly write a book! (MC, 85)

Instead of a joint writing effort, the novel began to take shape along the lines suggested by Ferrier, her friend contributing criticism, moral support, and one chapter. The opening scenes of the finished work conform closely to the incongruous situation Ferrier suggested to her friend early in the correspondence: “I do not recollect ever to have seen the sudden transition of a high-bred English beauty, who thinks she can sacrifice all for love, to an uncomfortable solitary Highland dwelling among tall red-haired sisters and grimfaced aunts” (MC, 76).

Ferrier insisted throughout her correspondence with Charlotte Clavering that the novel must have a moral; her friend's lack of moral concern in her plots was one element that Ferrier found incompatible with her own interests. Ferrier was no doubt sincere in her desire to write a moral novel. She was deeply affected by the pervasive religious atmosphere in Edinburgh which frowned upon activities as frivolous as novel writing, and her penchant for comic satire was countermanded by her admiration for serious moral writing. Nancy Paxton suggests that Ferrier's desire for a moral in her novel may have stemmed in part from more mercenary motives, a wish to make the book salable and popular.¹ Paxton's conclusion is based on the following passage from Ferrier's letters:

Suppose each of us try our hands on it; the moral to be deduced from that is to warn all young ladies against runaway matches, and the character and fate of the two sisters would be unexceptionable. I expect it will be the first book every wise matron will put into the hand of her daughter, and even the reviewers will relax of their severity in favour of the morality of this little work. (MC, 76)

From the tone of this passage and from an examination of Ferrier's general moral outlook, it would seem that she is assuming an ironic and comical attitude when she speaks of using the moral message to assuage critics and gain a readership. There is, no doubt, a grain of truth in her observation of the vagaries of the literary world; but Paxton's conclusion that Ferrier is not seriously concerned about a moral message in her writing contradicts a fundamental aspect of Ferrier's character that takes traditional morality very seriously, even while her ironic vision distances her from that morality and enables her to take liberties with it.

In order to live up to Ferrier's moral expectations, Charlotte Clavering smothered her inclinations toward the sensational and bizarre and wrote a very moral chapter for Marriage, “The History of Mrs. Douglas,” a set-piece that entirely lacks the liveliness and color of Clavering's letters. It is, as she herself admitted, “the only few pages that will be skipped” (MC, 133). Without the cruel wit and absurd characters of Ferrier's writing, Clavering's chapter is a flat tale of fashionable life, no worse or better than chapters in many second-rate novels of manners.

Although Charlotte Clavering did not contribute substantially to the writing of Marriage, she helped considerably in her role as editor and critic. “If any reader,” writes John Doyle, “takes the trouble to go through [Charlotte Clavering's] letter of May 10, 1813, and to compare ‘Marriage’ as we actually have it, with ‘Marriage’ as she criticizes it, they will see how much Miss Ferrier owed to her friend's advice” (MC, 48). Clavering's discourse on “high life” dialogue is particularly acute. She perceives that the conversations of the upper-class characters in Marriage are not realistic; “they are,” she writes, “a sort of thing by consent handed down from generation to generation in novels, but have little or no groundwork in truth” (MC, 115). No doubt Ferrier modified her draft considerably as a result of this letter—unfortunately the manuscript is not extant. She must have altered the time sequence of the novel so it does not end some years after the date of its publication; she probably took out some of the French phrases in Juliana's conversation as well. Clavering's letter is so perceptive that one feels her desire to be a novelist was unfortunate: she was a born critic.

Charlotte Clavering's inability to take an active part in the actual writing of Marriage may have been a major factor in delaying the publication of the novel. Marriage was not submitted to William Blackwood until 1817, eight years after the literary collaboration began. It was finally published anonymously in 1818. The initial planning took place five years before Scott published his first novel; by 1818 Britain was deep in the throes of Waverley madness—a fact which must have made Blackwood's decision to publish Marriage a relatively easy one, but which certainly detracted from its popular reception.

The question of why Ferrier waited so long to finish and publish her work remains unanswered. No doubt Clavering's lack of writing skill contributed to the delay, as did Ferrier's fear that her satiric caricatures could be easily recognized. Her hesitation may also have stemmed in part from her ambivalence toward comic novels and toward her own literary talents. She was, moreover, a slow and careful writer who never scribbled anything in a hurry except, perhaps, an occasional letter.

Ferrier's fear of reprisals, if it did not actually cause her to delay publication, did become a major factor in her decision to publish Marriage anonymously. She wrote Clavering: “if we engage in this undertaking, let it be kept a profound secret from every human being. If I was suspected of being accessory to such foul deeds my brothers and sisters would murder me, and my father bury me alive” (MC, 77). Anonymous publications, however, were very common at that time, even by writers who would never be sued for libel. After all, the identity of the “Author of Waverley” was still undisclosed. Women especially were reluctant to expose themselves to the publicity of literary life and to the tinge of immorality associated with novel writing. As Marriage was immediately successful, Ferrier rejoiced that she did not have to bear personally the burden of public criticism and praise. She could continue her private life in Edinburgh and began slowly turning her thoughts toward The Inheritance.

RECEPTION OF MARRIAGE

The story of old Mr. Ferrier's reaction to Marriage is worth repeating. Both W. M. Parker and Aline Grant tell the tale without demur, but John Doyle admits that it resembles one told about Fanny Burney. Nonetheless, the story goes that, as her father thoroughly disliked books by women writers, Susan Ferrier read her manuscript of Marriage to him from behind the curtains of his bed while he was ill. When she was done, he requested another book by the same author, claiming it was the best book she had ever brought him. When his daughter revealed the author's name, he was incredulous. Only the manuscript, so the story concludes, finally convinced him of his daughter's genius. The appeal of the story lies partly in that, from what we know of old James Ferrier, it sounds very like him.

The story also captures the enthusiasm with which many critics received Marriage. Blackwood's investment of a hundred fifty pounds was a remunerative one. When he received the novel, which Ferrier had first entitled The Chiefs of Glenfern, Blackwood wrote to her: “The whole construction and execution appear … so admirable that it would almost be presumption in any one to offer corrections to such a writer” (MC, 138-39). The most famous comment on Marriage was made by Walter Scott, in his guise as the Author of Waverley, in the Epilogue to The Legend of Montrose:

I retire from the [literary] field, conscious that 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.”²

As the Author of Waverley was at this time the lion of all Europe as well as of Britain, this was strong praise. And it was disinterested praise, for, although James Ferrier was a colleague of Scott's, there is no evidence that Scott knew the authorship of Marriage until much later.

Scottish readers loved Marriage. W. M. Parker claims that:

Not only did Edinburgh enjoy Marriage, for instance, as something new in contemporary fiction, but it discussed the book with animation at interminable bluestocking tea-parties, trying to identify the characters. Lady MacLaughlan must be Mrs. Dames, the sculptor, or Aunts Grizzy, Jacky, and Nicky were recognizable as the Misses Edmonstone of George Street, distantly related to the Duke of Argyll, and so on.³

John Doyle quotes the inestimable Mrs. Piozzi, Samuel Johnson's longtime friend, who wrote Sir James Fellowes in 1818: “Meanwhile ladies leave cards and starving females write romances. The novel called ‘Marriage’ is the newest and merriest. How marriage should be a new thing, that is at least as old as Adam, the author may tell: but ’tis a very comical thing, and would make Lady Fellowes laugh on a long evening” (MC, 146). Of Ferrier's acquaintances, only Monk Lewis, in his capricious manner, condemned Marriage. He criticized the work, however, before he had even seen it; in fact, he died before returning to Britain from Jamaica the year it was published. He writes in fussy consternation to Lady Charlotte Campbell:

I hear it rumored that Miss F-r doth write novels, or is about writing one. I wish she would leave such nonsense alone, for however great a respect I may entertain for her talents (which I do), I tremble lest she should fail in this book-making and as a rule I have an aversion, a pity and contempt for all female scribblers … [I am] at the present moment much enraged at Lady—for having come out in the shape of a novel, and now hearing that Miss F-r is about to follow her bad example, I write in great perturbation of mind, and cannot think or speak of anything else.⁴

The pervasive moralizing elements in Marriage that have contributed to its obscurity in the twentieth century were not distressing to readers in 1818; in fact, many readers and critics admired the author's high-mindedness. William Blackwood, knowledgeable in what would sell, particularly praises the characters most modern readers find overly sentimental and pietistic: “Every one has felt in youth the glow of enthusiasm so well pourtrayed in Mary” (MC, 139). “Your picture of the blind mother and her son,” he goes on to note, “is most striking” (MC, 140-41). Even as late as 1842 a critic for the Edinburgh Review described Ferrier as “one who has added so much to our picture gallery of original characters, and enlarged the boundaries of innocent enjoyment, without admitting an image or a sentiment which even a Christian moralist could disapprove.”⁵ As the century progressed, however, changing attitudes adversely affected the critics' reactions to Ferrier's combinations of comedy and moral comment: “unhappily,” writes a critic for Macmillan's in 1898, “she was possessed with the desire to convey moral instruction, and that has overlaid her humour and her genuine faculty of creation with a dead weight of platitudes under which they must inevitably sink.”⁶

Scott's novels, as has been mentioned, were both helpful and detrimental to Marriage. Some readers conjectured that the Author of Waverley was the author of Marriage: in the madness of Scott's popularity, any fiction with a Scottish setting was held by someone to be the work of the Lion of the North. As Wendy Craik writes, “it would have been much to Miss Ferrier's advantage if Sir Walter Scott had stuck to poetry and never turned his mind to novel-writing.”⁷ But at least one critic—the writer for the Edinburgh Review quoted above, averred that readers would tire of Scott and would find Ferrier's fiction more enduring:

… and now that the fascination produced by his genius has settled into a more sober, though not less deep feeling of admiration, and that the world has grown somewhat weary of the pomp and circumstance of chivalrous and historical pageants … the solid but unobtrusive excellences of [Ferrier's] novels will appear more and more conspicuous, as the stars come out with an independent lustre when the sun retires.⁸

Clearly this critic's prediction has not proved accurate; the historical pageantry of the Waverley Novels has lost much of its popular appeal in the twentieth century, but Scott's novels are still reread and reprinted. Ferrier's “more sober and homely order” of fiction⁹ is known to only the most ardent students of Scottish literature.

There is no doubt that Marriage is an uneven work. Ferrier would be the first to admit that she was not attempting to rival Scott's powers. But Marriage possesses a vitality, an earthiness, and a sense of humor ranging from the madcap to the cruelly satiric that are unsurpassed by any British woman novelist before her. We smile, even chuckle, at Austen's Mrs. Bennet and her marriageable daughters, but we laugh outright at Ferrier's five awkward “purple” girls and their long-chinned aunts. Austen delights us with the subtlety and precision with which she unravels her characters' errors and follies; Ferrier makes us laugh by her ruthless expositions of her human creations. She pushes them heartlessly into the most incongruous situations and magnifies their follies until they envelop the characters' whole being. Ferrier's satire and wit are without pity. Her characters are unable to change: they will remain gluttons, flirts, bores, or busybodies until they die. The reader cannot sympathize with them—and he or she is probably laughing too hard to want to sympathize with them.

STRUCTURE

Marriage brings together the histories of two generations and moves between two major settings; this flexible structure allows ample room for humorous anecdotes and characters of all kinds. “Of story,” wrote one critic, “[Marriage] had as little as the knife-grinder.”¹⁰ This is an exaggeration as is, to some degree, Saintsbury's comment on the story line: “This second volume [of Marriage] includes … not a few isolated studies of the ridiculous which can hardly be too highly spoken of. The drawback is that they have no more than the faintest connection with the story as such; indeed, it can hardly be said that there is any story in Marriage.”¹¹

Although Marriage is not unified by a tight plot line, it moves around recurring themes, situations, and relationships that lend a consistent form to the novel. The first part of Marriage satirizes rural Scottish life, the second satirizes English society. In the first part an English beauty visits Scotland, while in the second a rural Scottish lass visits England. In the first part a woman forms a runaway match for love; in the second her daughter marries solely for money. In both sections we are introduced to a succession of unfortunate or failed marriages and to a succession of comic characters—mostly women—whom Ferrier exposes in all their arrogance, vulgarity, stupidity, self-satisfaction, gluttony, or affectation. In each section we are also introduced to a “serious” female character—Mrs. Douglas and then Mary Douglas—who serves to reveal the ideal qualities a woman should possess and the ideal type of marriage into which she should enter. The moral of the novel is clear: women should balance their heads and hearts, marrying neither for passion nor money but entering into a loving relationship approved by both families. Corollary to this is the lesson that a woman who is obedient to her parents, no matter how irrational they may be, and exerts herself successfully in the domestic sphere will find peace and contentment.

The first volume of Marriage opens with the classic confrontation of a mercenary father, Lord Courtland, and his daughter, Juliana. The lord, viewing his daughter as part of his worldly goods, assumes she will be willing to cooperate complacently with his desire for further wealth by marrying a decrepit nobleman. Juliana resists her father and runs off with the handsome, good-humored, but indigent Lord Douglas. Like many of the parents and parent-figures in Ferrier's fiction, Lord Courtland is selfish and loveless; but although Juliana is a victim, she is no more sympathetic a character than her father. Her environment, heritage, and education have created a totally self-centered woman devoted to her dogs and her own comfort. As her feelings for young Henry Douglas stem from misinformed romantic notions rather than from real affection, she is unable to deal with the poverty and responsibilities of her marriage. She claims she would follow Henry to a desert, but admits she envisions a desert as “a beautiful place, full of roses and myrtles, and smooth green turf, and murmuring rivulets, and, though very retired, not absolutely out of the world; where one could occasionally see one's friends, and give dejeunés et fêtes champêtres” (M, 23).

Following her husband to Scotland, Juliana encounters a true desert in Glenfern Castle where they take shelter with Henry's father and a household of sisters and aunts. Juliana torments her new family with her coterie of lapdogs, macaws, and squirrels, her demand for exotic foods, and her fits of hysterics. She is a comic Mariana in her moated grange, but her mindless selfishness prevents the reader from feeling sorry for her.

The unmarried aunts and sisters of Henry Douglas may be compared to Bella Wilfer's siblings in Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend, to the party guests in Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall, or, even more closely perhaps, to the sisters, cousins, and aunts in W. S. Gilbert's H. M. S. Pinafore: they have very little individuality, but move as a comic unit—“three long-chinned spinsters … [and] five awkward purple girls” (M, 15). These women live far from civilization in a “tall thin gray house, something resembling a tower” (M, 10). They spend their days eating soups made of grease and leeks, sewing unnecessary items, and minding other people's business.

There are few characters with whom one can sympathize in the first part of Marriage. The sisters and aunts are complacent in their ignorance, and Henry's father is almost as irascible and unsympathetic as Juliana's parent. Douglas himself, like other men in Ferrier's works, is well-meaning but weak. His love for his wife fades under her willfulness; when he perceives that she does not change after giving birth to twins, he knows the marriage was a sad mistake. He is so undeveloped as a character, however, and so ineffectual, that his tragedy does not touch us.

The only serious, sympathetic character in this first section is Mrs. Douglas, the wife of Henry Douglas's brother, whose sad story was Charlotte Clavering's sole contribution to the text of Marriage. Mrs. Douglas is the ideal woman who has, unlike Juliana, forsworn the love of her life to conciliate her family. She has married an unremarkable man with whom she works to create a civilized little paradise from their plot of Scottish wilderness. A loving, unselfish woman, Mrs. Douglas takes on the responsibility of raising Juliana's daughter, Mary, while Juliana returns to London with her long-suffering husband and Mary's twin, Adelaide.

The next few chapters, set in England, trace the final ruin of Juliana's marriage. After wasting what few funds they have, Juliana moves in with her brother. Her husband goes to India. Their daughter Adelaide is raised in the same kind of extravagant, selfish household that formed the character of her mother. Meanwhile, Mary grows up in a pious, simple Scottish household where she comes to resemble her stepmother.

When Mary is full-grown she is sent back to England to meet her true mother and her sister Adelaide, while also being introduced to the new world of English manners and society. Whereas Ferrier satirizes the homeliness and ignorance of Scottish manners and society in the first section, she satirizes the affectation, extravagance, and empty frivolity of English life in the second. Mary meets the gluttonous Dr. Redgill, the haughty Lord Lindore, and a host of comical women with names reminiscent of Restoration comedy: Lady Placid, Mrs. Wiseacre, the Honourable Mrs. Downe Wright, etc. Mary's worldly and humorous cousin, Lady Emily, guides her through the social mazes of London, helping Mary in ways that her selfish mother and twin sister do not.

The conflict of the final section of Marriage centers on Mary's ineffectual efforts to establish a loving relationship with her mother, who remains heartless and capricious, and to find the man of her heart. Refusing, like Mrs. Douglas, to marry for money, Mary falls in love with Charles Lennox, the son of a blind woman she has befriended. With some setbacks, Mary and Charles move toward the sort of marriage foreshadowed by that of Mr. and Mrs. Douglas in Scotland. When Juliana will not condone the marriage, Mary refuses to elope as her mother did, although her mother is irrational and capricious. Adelaide, meanwhile, who has married for money rather than love, runs off with the man she thinks she loves, and finds herself a social outcast on the Continent. Only with the proper balance of compatibility, love, and familial approbation, the novel repeatedly assures us, can a woman find happiness in her marriage and usefulness in her life. As the world of the novel is a just one, Juliana finally approves of Mary's engagement before joining her scandalous daughter on the Continent. The novel ends with the marriages of Mary and Charles and of Emily and her Edward. The fortuitous death of Mary's Scottish neighbor, Sir Sampson, provides her and Charles with a fortune on the day of their wedding—a just reward for their virtuous lives and correct decisions. They move away from London to the more healthful and less decadent life of Scotland where, the novel implies, they will pursue lives as worthwhile and meaningful as those of Mr. and Mrs. Douglas.

HUMOR

Plot summaries do not begin to capture the nature of Marriage any more than—though for somewhat different reasons—they capture the essence of Tristram Shandy. The plot of Ferrier's work is a slight string holding together the humorous characters and situations in which she delights: “although her books have little plot,” explains Craik, “they have plenty of events.”¹² We remember—not the romance of Mary Douglas and Charles Lennox—but Lady Maclaughlan's penchant for homemade cures, Dr. Redgill's maniacal fascination with food, and Aunt Grizzy's encounter with a ladies' literary group. Craik writes: “Susan Ferrier's greatest power is that of provoking the kind of amusement that vents itself in mirth, and she has that rare power of prodding even the silent solitary student into outright laughter. She has no rigid or limited formula for comedy, but, rather, a wide variety of methods.”¹³

The plots of Ferrier's novels are familiar to anyone who has sampled nineteenth-century novels, but her humor is not derivative. It is Scottish, feminine, and uniquely her own. The uncouthness of many of her characters and the relentless manner in which she exposes them are reminiscent of Smollett and Fielding. Her ear for the comedic possibilities of Scottish speech and her eye for clashes between English and Scottish manners rival Scott's. Her ability to create humor from trivial incidents of everyday Scottish life somewhat resembles Galt's. But, while comparisons with these male authors are possible, the perspective and sympathies of her works are intrinsically those of a woman; she is concerned with the lives of women and the spheres in which they move. She is the first woman to create Scottish novels of manners from a woman's point of view and to capture the inherently humorous aspects of Scottish life as a woman perceived them.

The most obvious form of humor in Marriage is the profusion of eccentric characters who display their peculiarities in every word they speak. These characters are predictable—only a few characters in Ferrier's fiction are actually surprising—but Ferrier usually maintains a delicate balance to insure that their foibles are not tedious to the reader, no matter how exasperating they may be to the other characters in the fiction. Dr. Redgill, for example, is no more and no less than The Gourmand. His daily feeding is all that concerns him. We come to expect his obsession each time he comes on the scene, but Ferrier's innovation and sense of timing can make us laugh afresh each time, just as we laugh at Lady Teazle or Tabitha Bramble. He is a welcome relief from Mary Douglas's patient suffering in her mother's house and from the incipient sentimentality of her love affair. Even at the culmination of the romantic plot, when Mary is about to leave for her wedding in Scotland, the serious moment is undercut by the good doctor's farewell:

“I wish you a pleasant journey, Miss Mary,” cried Dr. Redgill. “The game season is coming on, and—” But the carriage drove off, and the rest of the sentence was dispersed by the wind; and all that could be collected was, “grouse always acceptable—friends at a distance—roebuck stuffed with heather carries well at all times,” etc. etc. (M, 611-12)

Dr. Redgill and Sir Sampson are exceptional in Marriage in that they are comic males who make more than a token appearance. Males do not feature prominently in Ferrier's fiction except in mandatory roles of lover (good or bad) or father-figure (usually negligent). They are there specifically either to help the heroine or to impede her progress toward happiness. Lord Courtland, Lord Lindore, the Laird of Glenfern, the Duke of Altamont, and even Charles Lennox are standard figures from fiction and drama. Ferrier obviously takes only a modicum of interest in them; she is concerned with the lives and characters of women both in her serious plot and in her rich variety of comic scenes.

Sir Sampson affects the fate of Mary Douglas only by dying. Weak of body and mind, dominated by his terrifying wife, Sir Sampson is the comic epitome of the male in Marriage. He is introduced in this manner: “The lackey, meanwhile, advanced to the carriage; and, putting in both his hands, as if to catch something, he pulled forth a small bundle, enveloped in a military cloak, the contents of which would have baffled conjecture, but for the large cocked hat and little booted leg which protruded at opposite extremities” (M, 56). Sir Sampson is little more than a comic “bundle”—not a real personality. The female characters are the life and focus of the novel.

Marriage purports to be about marriage—the pages are filled with marriages of every description—but it is more accurately concerned with women who are married, women who are considering getting married, and women who have never married. Ferrier presents many of these women as highly absurd and ridiculous creatures, but she also presents serious criticisms of women's personalities and roles. Lady Juliana, as the “heroine” of the first part of the novel, is a prime example of the author's comic strategy: Juliana is an exaggerated character, far too thoughtless and selfish to be realistic. Like Dr. Redgill, she is a “flat” character. But, as the heartless beauty whose upbringing and education have left her without mental resources of any kind, she contributes to a commentary on a very real problem in English society: she reveals both the uselessness of women who are expected only to be beautiful and the resulting deterioration of their characters. Juliana, with her lapdogs and macaws, is comical, especially when we first see her in the primitive castle at Glenfern. But as we see the destruction she wreaks and the merciless manner in which she destroys her husband's love for her, her character assumes a dimension never approached by Dr. Redgill or Sir Sampson.

Ferrier does not allow Juliana to become more than a completely predictable cardboard character, yet, when her follies are piled before us, she becomes less a figure of comedy than one of evil and corruption. In a similar way Dickens moves us from laughing at a character like Mrs. Jellyby to perceiving the tragic results of her actions: Mrs. Jellyby is the same throughout Bleak House, but the author manipulates the reader to feel differently about her and to understand her significance more completely as the novel progresses.

Juliana and Adelaide, in their sophistication and heartlessness, are contrasted throughout Marriage with the comic aunts and cousins at Glenfern whose errors stem from good-heartedness: though very different, both types of women suffer from the limitations of their education and from the expectations society has of them. The Scottish women, introduced as laughable spinsters, illustrate the smallness of mind that develops in a world where women can do nothing but mend china and sew. These women are more lovable than Juliana and Adelaide, but their lives are equally useless and the possibility of their doing actual harm is very real: Mrs. Douglas must save the baby Mary from their misinformed and potentially lethal ministrations.

The spinsters of Glenfern operate primarily, as mentioned above, as a comic unit. Only Aunt Grizzy becomes an individual for us, separating herself from the others to visit Mary in London, where her simple manners are as out of keeping with the society as Juliana's extravagant humors were in Scotland. Ferrier is again able to manipulate her readers' reactions to a comic character, even though her Grizzy is a fuzzy-headed old woman who reminds us of many other such ladies in British fiction. Her simplicity and gullibility are comic, but the unselfish old woman who sees no harm in anyone stands in contrast to the affectations and cruelty of Juliana and Adelaide. The scene in which Grizzy is virtually robbed by the hypocritical Mrs. Fox, who takes money from her friends under the guise of collecting for charity, is not presented with the slapstick humor of the scenes in Glenfern; we are moved to pity poor Grizzy, even though she is oblivious to the way in which she is exploited.

Thus Grizzy seems to be a fragile character whose innocence prevents her from being pathetic. Yet her good qualities are part of a full spectrum of values on which Ferrier is commenting throughout the novel. Mary, as the ideal heroine, is closer to Grizzy in her simplicity than she is to Juliana and Adelaide; but Mary must balance that simplicity with the good sense, prudence, and experience that Grizzy lacks. Although Grizzy seems, at moments, to emerge from the confines of a one-dimensional comic character, it is her comic role that dominates the novel. Ferrier even awards her the final speech of Marriage, countering the serious elements of Sir Sampson's death and Mary's marriage with comedy:

To think of your succeeding to Lady Maclaughlan's laboratory [she says to Mary], all so nicely fitted up with every kind of thing, and especially plenty of the most charming bark, which, I’m sure, will do Colonel Lennox the greatest good, as you know all officers are much the better for bark. I know it was the saving of young Ballingall's life, when he came home in an ague from some place; and I’m certain Lady Maclaughlan will leave you everything that is there, you was always such a favourite. Not but what I must always think that you had a hand in dear Sir Sampson's death. Indeed, I have no doubt of it. Yet at the same time, I don’t mean to blame you in the least; for I’m certain, if Sir Sampson had been spared, he would have been delighted, as we all are, at your marriage. (M, 615)

Aunt Grizzy and the other women at Glenfern reveal what appear to be the unfortunate results of spinsterhood: an obsessive concern with trifles, a belief in other people's theories of upbringing and education, and a tendency to be unworldly about money and people. As the narrator explains, “Their walk lay amongst threads and pickles; their sphere extended from the garret to the pantry; and often as they sought to diverge from it, their instinct always led them to return to it, as the tract in which they were destined to move” (M, 231).

Despite the barrenness of the spinsters' lives, however, there are very few examples in the novel of women whose lives are richer or happier in the married state: in fact, in their obliviousness, the ladies of Glenfern are probably happier than any other characters in Marriage. The marriages of most of the comic characters are funny, but they reveal the multitudes of ways in which relationships can fail. Although the affectation of Mrs. Gawffaw and the noisy hilarity of her husband prevent the reader from sympathizing with them, we see through them to a disastrous home life, for which each partner blames the flaws of the other. Lady Sufton lives for show and “proper pride”: having married “Mr. Sufton, a silly old man, who had been dead to the world for many years” (M, 405), she keeps him in his chamber until he dies literally and she can give him a splendid funeral. Mrs. Pullens is the Ultimate Housekeeper whose household management upsets even the easygoing Mr. Pullens: he can only comfort himself by thinking that “his lot was the lot of all married men who are blest with active, managing, economical wives” (M, 543). Unfortunate marriages such as these complement the serious action of the novel in which Juliana makes the mistake of marrying poor Henry Douglas and her daughter abandons the Duke of Altamont to run off with Lord Lindore.

Throughout Marriage Ferrier relentlessly satirizes the foibles and flaws of mindless women in both the married and single states. “There are creatures of the same sort in the male part of the creation,” the narrator notes at one point, “but it is foreign to my purpose to describe them at present” (M, 231). Her satire exposes women's weaknesses, only suggesting the elements of society that helped to form these weaknesses. Ferrier offers no sympathy. She does not revile the society that produced the monsters she depicts, but simply describes a fictional world, much like her own, from which the reader can draw his or her own conclusions: her social commentaries are carefully clothed in comedy. She is apt to become homiletic only on less controversial topics, such as conventional morality and obedience to one's parents. Yet, despite her reluctance to verbalize her social concerns, they permeate the novel. Again and again she turns her humor against women who do not use their minds. Mary Douglas's cousin, Lady Emily, describes them:

Married ladies only celebrated for their good dinners, or their pretty equipages, or their fine jewels. How I should scorn to be talked of as the appendage to any soups or pearls. Then there are the daughters of these ladies—Misses, who are mere misses, and nothing more. Oh! the insipidity of a mere Miss! a soft simpering thing with pink cheeks, and pretty hair, and fashionable clothes;—sans eyes for anything but lovers—sans ears for anything but flattery—sans taste for anything but balls—sans brains for anything at all! (M, 376-77)

Although Ferrier makes fun of women who do not think, she is also critical of bluestockings and women overly absorbed in intellectualizing. Chapter 64, for example, is an almost self-contained vignette satirizing a women's literary circle, exposing the shallowness of women with literary pretensions. In this chapter may lie another reason for Ferrier's reluctance to admit that she was an author: she despised the smugness and conceit of female critics and writers. These women, in Ferrier's fiction, speak in literary quotations and argue learnedly over the implications of the word crunch. In comic opposition to them is poor Aunt Grizzy who understands nothing, including the women's condescension toward her, and only wishes her niece would take part in the poetic conversation: “You used to have the Hermit and all Watts' Hymns by heart, when you was little,” she says to Mary (M, 556). Mary, as usual, is meant to be the ideal character whose response to literature is intelligent but unaffected: “Mary had been accustomed to read, and to reflect upon what she read, and to apply it to the purpose for which it is valuable, viz. in enlarging her mind and cultivating her taste; but she had never been accustomed to prate, or quote, or sit down for the express purpose of displaying her acquirements” (M, 547).

Ferrier was clearly so uncomfortable with the image of the female author that she may well have preferred anonymity to the burden of that identity. Her contempt for “female scribblers” was almost as strong as that of Monk Lewis—but, unlike him, she discriminated between the scribblers and the authors: she does not censure Jane Austen or Maria Edgeworth, but satirizes women such as Mrs. Griffon in Marriage who writes the effusive verses of “Billows of Love.” And even more than satirizing the quality of such literary works, Ferrier directs her humor toward the ostentatious manner in which literary authorship is flaunted: it is not surprising that she took refuge in anonymous publication—and never participated in a ladies' literary circle. From a description of the sharp-pointedness of Ferrier's humor, one might assume that she is scornful of women—married or unmarried, homebodies or literary talents: her cruel comedy extends to women of most social strata and dispositions. But her perspectives and sympathies are intrinsically those of a woman; while she is intolerant of women's weaknesses and exploits them to the hilt in her comedy, she exposes and exaggerates flaws common among women in order to contrast them with the virtues and strengths of her serious characters—Mrs. Douglas, Mary, and to a certain extent, Mrs. Lennox. The virtues of these women stand out among the vices and deficiencies of their family and acquaintances—and present a positive balance to the otherwise satiric caricatures of women. Ferrier's major concern is with women and the kinds of existence they have brought on themselves with the assistance, naturally, of men. Like that of many satirists, Ferrier's humor leaves no room for pity; but it is tempered by her efforts to reveal the ideal characteristics women may develop in themselves and the possible ways with which they can deal with the inherent limitations of their lives.

DOUBLE MESSAGES IN MARRIAGE

In a fundamental way Ferrier's first novel is a book for and about women. It depicts elements of Scottish and English life that male writers did not usually describe, and it focuses on females almost to the total exclusion of men. But Marriage—and the novels which followed—also express deep-seated and unresolved contradictions not encountered by the majority of male artists. Although Ferrier's creative and comedic powers equalled at times some of the best-known writers of her day, she accepted a conservative, Protestant belief system that led her to doubt the propriety of a woman displaying such powers. Uncomfortable with her own wit and satiric perceptions of society, she sought to whitewash them with moral and sentimental material more “proper” for a woman writer. Her novels read like the collaborative efforts of two unsuited authors—one rather cruel and wickedly funny, the other pious, romantic, and serious.

These two “authors” or voices develop not only contrasting tones, but contradictory themes within the novel. The romantic plot produces the same clichés about honor, obedience, and domestic bliss that are repeated in numerous nineteenth-century novels: if the heroine is virtuous and pious, obeying both her heart and the authority figures in her life, she will eventually attain wealth, a loving husband, and, if particularly lucky, a title. Counterposed to this plot, however, is a wealth of satire and humor that establishes startlingly different themes and appears to undercut the whole fabric of the romantic action. In the satiric elements of the novel we encounter marriages that have failed, households as badly run as any in Bleak House, and, most important, women who suffer from their roles in society as daughters, wives, aunts: women who have been badly educated, who have been emotionally and intellectually stunted, who are useless and bored. Again and again Ferrier's comedy exposes the horrors of boredom in the lives of women, be they beautiful socialites or obscure spinsters. But she offers no pity to these women. She does not dilute her satire with pathos, nor does she allow her trapped characters to escape ennui through action as do Charlotte Brontë's Shirley and Elizabeth Gaskell's Margaret Hale.

In Ferrier's fictional scheme the only escape from total boredom is a successful domestic life. Yet, although she sends her young heroine off into married bliss at the end of the novel, she offers almost no scenes, images, or characters indicating that a woman's life can become full and significant. A marriage such as Mrs. Douglas's is the best Ferrier can offer: here the woman has accepted with Christian love the necessary compromises in her life. On the one hand, Ferrier offers us—and appears to believe in—the clichés of “living happily ever after”; on the other hand, deeply disconcerted by the realities of women's lives, she exposes those realities through her comedy. Her writing reveals an ongoing argument, a subtle dialogue, that Ferrier herself seems never to have fully recognized.

Of her three novels, Marriage expresses this dialogue most forcibly. The simple moral, which Ferrier considered so vital, is deceptive. Interwoven with the serious, pietistic story are hundreds of pages of satiric comedy that reveal the hollowness of the moral. Nancy Paxton examines the language of the serious plot, determining that the heroine, Mary Douglas, has undergone a “radical education” that sets her on a “collision course” with her mother. Paxton claims that in her novels “Susan Ferrier is enjoying a wonderful joke by tricking those ‘wise matrons’ who unsuspectingly put her apparently conventional ‘little volume’ into the hands of their innocent daughters.”¹⁴ Much of Paxton's analysis does reveal an undercurrent of rebellion against the strictures of society, but there is very little evidence that this undercurrent is at all a conscious one. Ferrier's memoirs, letters, later novels, and even the passages in Marriage examined by Paxton expose what might be termed an “unconscious feminism,” not a subversive one. Far from being a revolutionary who wanted to subvert the innocent daughters of wise matrons, Ferrier was a pious, politically unenlightened woman who sincerely wished to write a “moral” novel. But, although she developed no radical theories, her novels reveal an inchoate desire to rebel. Her feminism is not yet crystallized. Perhaps if she had lived in London or had been born twenty years later, she would have written as directly as Mary Wollstonecraft. Instead, she presents us with comic commentaries through which we can discern her serious, unrealized complaints regarding marriage and the limitations of women's lives.

The first part of Marriage, while bringing together the manners of England and Scotland in a confrontation worthy of Scott, also contrasts the situation of married women with that of unmarried ones. The spinsters of Glenfern Castle lead essentially useless lives in an emotionally and intellectually barren environment. Aunt Grizzy and Aunt Jacky sum up the important accomplishments of young ladies in this environment—pieces of needlework: “Most girls of Mary's time of life that ever I had anything to do with, had something to show before [Mary's] age. Bella had worked the globe long before she was sixteen; and Baby did her filigree tea-caddy the first quarter she was at Miss Macgowk's. …” (M, 212).

The narrator summarizes the tasks and virtues of the older women and the young ladies: “to knit stockings, scold servants, cement china, trim bonnets, lecture the poor, and look up to Lady Maclaughlan … were the virtues of ripened years and enlarged understandings—what their pupils might hope to arrive at, but could not presume to meddle with. Their merits consisted in being compelled to sew certain large portions of white-work; learning to read and write in the worst manner; occasionally wearing a collar, and learning the notes on a spinnet” (M, 210).

The collar to which the narrator refers is one of the most apt images of the condition of women in this environment. It is a heavy metal contraption designed to improve the female posture: “The collar had long been a galling yoke upon their minds; its iron had entered into their very souls; for it was a collar presented to the family of Glenfern by the wisest, virtuousest, best of women and grandmothers, the good Lady Girnachgowl. … Not Venus's girdle even was supposed to confer greater charms than the Girnachgowl collar” (M, 213-14).

The men in this novel are in a somewhat better position than the women. The laird has the responsibilities of his cows and lands to distract him; Sir Sampson lives with memories, at least, of his military past; and young Douglas considers becoming a farmer or returning to his military life. These men retain the possibility for action; their lives are not centered on needlework. The manner in which Ferrier presents the men, however, contributes to the theme of protest running persistently through the novel, for, while most of the men are mentally inferior to the women—and some, like Sir Sampson, are physically weaker—they are permitted outlets for their energies that are denied the women. Once again Ferrier offers no overt statement, nor does she offer a solution; she avoids direct confrontation with these controversial problems. She seems to accept the freedom of men and the concomitant boredom of women, be they married or single, as laws of the universe.

It is not possible for either the aunts and “purple” girls in Glenfern or for Lady Juliana in London to escape uselessness and tedium. Due to her selfishness and inability to love, Juliana cannot ease her boredom with the responsibilities of domestic life. Ferrier blames these fundamental aspects of Juliana's character on her education, explaining that she had been “educated for the sole purpose of forming a brilliant establishment, of catching the eye, and captivating the senses” (M, 57). But, although not personally guilty of forming her own character, Juliana is nonetheless irredeemable.

Ferrier presents alternatives to these lives of meaningless activity in the noncomic characters of Mrs. Douglas and Mary, Adelaide's twin, whom Juliana has abandoned. Mrs. Douglas spends her life working in concert with her husband, transforming the wilderness into cultivated farmland and raising her niece, Mary. Under the tutelage of her foster mother, Mary gains Mrs. Douglas's inner peace, piety, wisdom, and ability to treat people well despite their faults. As Vineta Colby has pointed out in Yesterday's Women, education is a primary factor in Ferrier's theory of character development;¹⁵ because Mary is educated well, she is able to avoid the paralysis experienced by her mother and aunts. Mrs. Douglas believes that uselessness is the primary source of women's disorders, and she educates Mary to be as useful as possible within the limited sphere of women's lives.

Beneath this solution to the overriding problem of the novel, however, runs a thread of irony, or perhaps a doubt that this is, after all, the perfect answer to women's problems. Mrs. Douglas, we see, is not a happy character: she is a strong character who overcomes unhappiness. Having declined the sort of runaway marriage Juliana makes, she lives with a husband whom she respects but does not passionately love. Her husband, like the other non-comical males of the novel, is unremarkable. From what little we see of him, he obviously lacks his wife's intelligence and sensitivity. Mrs. Douglas's patience and diligence, not her relationship with her husband, prevent her from being as bored as Lady Juliana.

Young Mary's relationship with Charles Lennox in the second part of the novel acquires a balance lacking in that of the Douglases. Mary manages to marry a man she loves and to receive approval from her family. But, although we are assured that Charles is Mary's equal, we see too little of him to assess him closely. He is not introduced until chapter 44, and then he only appears for a few key scenes. As Mary herself is a fairly uninteresting (and sometimes irritating) model heroine and Charles merely the outline of the model male, their marriage seems appropriate. Was Ferrier trying to depict the tedium of a perfect union by boring readers past endurance? It is evident, at any rate, that she did not enter creatively into Charles and Mary's relationship; she relied heavily on the clichés of popular novels of manners. And because their union did not capture her imagination, it does not capture ours.

The oddest aspect of Charles and Mary's relationship is that they are brought together through death. Only with the death of his mother do Charles and Mary recognize their mutual love, joining hands over Mrs. Lennox's corpse. Their wedding day brings yet another death—that of Sir Sampson. He is a comic character whom we can neither pity nor love, so we do not grieve for him. His death, moreover, is necessary to bring the young couple into a fortune. But his death reinforces a somber aspect of their relationship: their wedding is shaded with thoughts of mortality. And, of course, the associations of marriage and death (which are repeated in Lady Sufton's marriage in this novel and in the grotesquely comic relationship of the peasant couple in The Inheritance) contribute to the psychological, if not symbolic, configuration of the novel. Like Ferrier's humorous scenes, these deaths illuminate conflicts within the author.

The relationship between Mary and her cousin Emily reveals even more clearly than that of Charles and Mary the contradictions in Ferrier's attitudes toward marriage, the roles of women, and comedy itself. As the ideal heroine, Mary is characterized by her piety, docility, and familial affection. Her independent spirit manifests itself only when her capricious mother forbids her to go to church and wants her to marry a man she does not love. Emily is of an altogether different stamp. Lively, witty, contentious, satiric, she is as independent as Brontë's Shirley and as self-willed as Austen's Emma. Her humor brightens the last section of the novel. She is as funny and as cruel as the comic narrator/author—in fact, at times their voices merge almost completely. Emily takes up quarrels that Mary will not fight for herself; she exposes the weaknesses of others; and she deftly creates situations that will bring out the worst qualities of all parties involved. Her long diatribe on the guests expected at an upcoming ball (chapter 43) is an extended piece of humor as accurate and cruel as any of the comic narrator's expositions. Emily's description of Lady Placid, for example, captures the nature of the woman who manages to turn everything into praise of herself:

“The grossest insult that could be offered she would construe into an elegant compliment; the very crimes of others she seems to consider as so much incense offered up at the shrine of her immaculate virtue. I’m certain she thinks she deserves to be canonised for having kept out of Doctors' Commons. Never is any affair of that sort alluded to that she does not cast such a triumphant look towards her husband, as much as to say, ‘Here am I, the paragon of faithful wives and virtuous matrons!’ Were I in his place, I should certainly throw a plate at her head.” (M, 372)

Despite her prudish nature, Mary laughs at Emily's humor, but she tries to defend the insufferable characters described by her cousin with the same argument used by the author to defend Juliana and Adelaide: they have been badly educated. Emily admits the truth of this, but offers herself as an example of a woman who has been able to resist her governesses: “… thank heaven! I got the better of them. Fascinating was what they wanted to make me; but whenever the word was mentioned, I used to knit my brows, and frown upon them in such a sort. The frown, I know, sticks by me; but no matter—a frowning brow is better than a false heart, and I defy anyone to say that I am fascinating” (M, 379). Education may be responsible in large part for the plight of Juliana and Adelaide, just as it has been a factor in the fate of the aunts and sisters of Glenfern, but Emily makes it clear that one's character is not entirely in the hands of one's teachers. Ferrier does not pursue the implicit argument of inherited versus acquired traits which Mary and Emily's conversation initiates, but the strengths of Emily's viewpoint reveal, perhaps, the source of the narrator's pitiless attitudes toward the hapless characters of Marriage. Despite her explanations that these people have been poorly educated, the narrator, like Emily, appears to condemn the inherent weaknesses that prevent people from escaping the paralysis of their lives.

Emily is the only character in this novel who is funny without being absurd in herself, the only character whom we laugh with, not at. She deftly diminishes every type of fashionable woman who has succumbed to the manners of the day. Her conversational manner closely resembles Susan Ferrier's private correspondence and reflects the author's own creed—unspoken, but obvious throughout her writings:

My perceptions [says Emily] are so peculiarly alive to all that is obnoxious to them that I could as soon preach my eyes into blindness, or my ears into deafness, as put down my feelings with chopping logic. If people will be affected and ridiculous, why must I live in a state of warfare with myself on account of the feelings they rouse within me? … A very saint must sicken at the sight of affectation, you’ll allow. Vulgarity, even innate vulgarity, is bearable—stupidity itself is pardonable—but affectation is never to be endured or forgiven. (M, 378-79)

In depicting a character closely resembling her own, Susan Ferrier creates a complex, intelligent, interesting woman who can stand on equal footing with any character drawn by the Brontës, Edgeworth, or Austen. But Ferrier is uncomfortable with Emily. A strong part of her does not approve of Emily's outspokenness, her satiric wit, her resistance to society's molds. It is the pious and docile Mary whom Ferrier puts on a pedestal before her readers. It is Mary who ostensibly wins, in her mild-mannered way, each small confrontation with Emily. Emily understands that Mary is a better person than herself; she praises her friend for possessing qualities the very opposite of her own. Mary, she says, “never finds occasion to censure or condemn the conduct of any one, however flagrant it may be in the eyes of others; because she seems to think virtue is better expressed by her own actions than by her neighbours' vices” (M, 381). Emily admits that she once thought Mary was an “intellectual ghoul” (M, 412), but claims she has since learned that her cousin has a sense of humor—she laughs at her cousin's jokes, even though she does not fabricate them herself. By the end of the novel Emily, like the author, has exalted Mary as the perfect woman of understanding and taste, a blend of womanly patience and docility, obedient to authority figures and able to keep her passions carefully in check. And Mary is rewarded for her virtues by—what else?—a perfect husband.

Emily, too, becomes a wife, but she must accept second-best in a husband. She does, in fact, cast her eye on Mary's lover before she realizes her cousin is interested in him. Emily's betrothed is handsome, brave, charming, but not intelligent or mature. Emily claims that her love for him stems from their early friendship and from the fact that, while he is ignorant, he is unaffected. “I grant you,” Emily explains, “Edward talks absurdly, and asks questions à faire dresser les cheveux of a Mrs. Bluemits. But that amuses me; for his ignorance is not the ignorance of vulgarity or stupidity, but the ignorance of a light head and a merry heart” (M, 584).

Emily is a flawed character who, though perceptive of her own faults, must be discreetly punished for them in a husband who is her inferior. Emily describes Mary's strengths and her own limitations in this way:

Ah! they know little of human nature who think that to perform great actions one must necessarily be a great character. So far from that, I now see there may be much more real greatness of mind displayed in the quiet tenor of a woman's life than in the most brilliant exploits ever performed by man. Methinks I could help to storm a city; but to rule my own spirit is a task beyond me. (M, 590)

Emily expresses here the conventional attitude espoused by the serious voice of the novel: her lack of discipline is her fatal flaw which prevents her, in the “just” world of fiction, from attaining the bliss won by the more perfect Mary. Yet, despite the moral implied by the author and by Emily herself, it is apparent that Emily's lack of discipline is actually an ability to escape the disciplinary bonds imposed by her governesses and other authority figures. It is this same quality that sharpens her vision and wit, enabling her to act as a spokesperson for the author.

Through Emily's humor, which is never far removed from social criticism, Ferrier expresses her complaints more forcibly than anywhere else in the novel. The decorous voice of Susan Ferrier makes it clear that the flaws in Emily's life are due to Emily herself; but the treacherous undertones of the author's voice reveal the real flaws to be in the society that stifles Emily—a society that forces women to wear the Girnachgowl collar. Emily is as out of place in her society as Dorothea Brooke of George Eliot's Middlemarch is in hers: “Oh that I had been born the persecuted daughter of some ancient baron bold instead of the spoiled child of a good natured modern earl! Heavens! to think that I must tamely, abjectly submit to be married in the presence of all my family, even in the very parish church! Oh, what detractions from the brilliancy of my star!” (M, 591). Her marriage, she states, will be “quite an insipid, every-day affair” (M, 590). Lacking George Eliot's vision and more sophisticated perceptions, Ferrier ridicules the limitations of nineteenth-century society and then punishes her character for not conforming to them.

There is nothing in Ferrier's correspondence to indicate that she was aware of incorporating double messages in her writing, or that she consciously experienced the guilt and doubts about herself that she demonstrates through Emily. Ferrier's own education led her to believe that pious docility was admirable in a woman and that even a satiric sense of humor bordered on wickedness. But Ferrier's perceptions were as alive as Emily's to all that was obnoxious to them; she could not hide her complaints about society, nor could she offset the troubling implications of her comedy with a simple moral. She truly wanted to believe that Mary has taken the better part, but she undercut her own arguments with the brilliant character of Emily.

Characters closely resembling Emily do not appear in Ferrier's later novels. As she grew older, Ferrier seems to have disapproved even more strongly of the satiric and rebellious elements in her own personality. She grew more reluctant to verbalize the attitudes Emily upholds. In both The Inheritance and Destiny the same conflicts within the author remain evident, but they are submerged in more complex plots and more overt moralizing. Gertrude, the heroine of The Inheritance, retains some of Emily's independence as well as some of Mary's sweetness and naiveté; but Gertrude must suffer acutely for her flaws before she can win the proper husband: the novel follows a traditional pattern of sin, purgation, and redemption. In Destiny Edith suffers greatly from the unkindness of her father, who loves only his male child, and of her betrothed, who she discovers loves another woman. Yet the “sin” for which she must repent is her own despair: her lack of faith and inability to patiently accept the trials of womanhood.

In the more serious atmosphere of these two later novels the uselessness of women and the limitations of their lives remain constant and sometimes bitter themes. As she grew old and nearly blind, Ferrier used her satiric humor to depict characters and situations that would be sources of tragedy for another writer. But she resolutely turned her deepest concerns into comedy and concealed them, even from herself, with comforting plot lines and familiar maxims. Through her strange mixture of comedy and seriousness there may be an unconscious plea for her readers to look more closely at their own lives and the myths they have accepted. Her novels express the confusion experienced by women for centuries as they question, consciously or unconsciously, the patterns imposed on them. Ferrier's biting humor exposes an anger she could not express in any other form.

Notes

1. Nancy L. Paxton, “Subversive Feminism: A Reassessment of Susan Ferrier's Marriage,” Women and Literature 6, no. 1 (1976): 19.

2. Walter Scott, The Legend of Montrose (London and New York: George Routledge & Sons, 1879), p. 339.

3. W. M. Parker, Susan Ferrier and John Galt (London, 1965), p. 22.

4. Quoted by Aline Grant, Susan Ferrier of Edinburgh (Denver, 1957), p. 108.

5. Anon., “Miss Ferrier's Novels,” Edinburgh Review 74 (1841-42): 498.

6. Anon., “Miss Ferrier,” Macmillan's Magazine 79 (1898-99): 419.

7. Wendy Craik, “Susan Ferrier,” Scott Bicentenary Essays, ed. Alan Bell (Edinburgh, 1973), p. 322.

8. Anon., “Miss Ferrier's Novels,” Edinburgh Review, p. 499.

9. Ibid.

10. Ibid., p. 501.

11. George Saintsbury, “Miss Ferrier,” Collected Essays and Papers, vol. 1 (London, 1923), p. 314.

12. Craik, “Susan Ferrier,” p. 326.

13. Ibid., p. 323.

14. Paxton, “Subversive Feminism,” p. 27.

15. Vineta Colby, Yesterday's Women (Princeton, 1974), pp. 98-108.