Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Susan Ferrier
-
Standard Name: Ferrier, Susan
Birth Name: Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
Nickname: Roe
Pseudonym: The Author of Marriage
SF
was a conservative early nineteenth-century novelist of Edinburgh manners, who builds her novels out of acute observation, wit, moralising, and literary quotation.
This contains autobiographical fragments and insightful comments on other women writers. Objects of AG
's comment include Susan Ferrier
, Charlotte Smith
(whose poems AG
felt to be easy, flowing, and correct, but low on...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Margaret Oliphant
Oliphant's views on the status of women shifted somewhat with time. She dismissed the women's suffrage petition, and represented women who supported suffrage as unnatural. Answering Barbara Bodichon
, she argued that marriage was...
Textual Production
Anne Damer
Some of the attacks she sustained, both visual and literary, amount to the creation of fictionalised versions of her. The Damerian Apollo, a print published by William Holland
in 1789, showed her vigorously knocking...
Textual Production
Anne Marsh
The title-page bore a creative misquotation from William Wordsworth
: She lived within her father's halls . . . And very few to love—which converts the rustic Lucy into an upper-class heroine like AM
Textual Production
Lady Charlotte Bury
She was probably planning this work when in 1810 she told Charlotte Clavering
that Susan Ferrier
's novels made her despair of ever writing as well.
Mudge, Bradford Keyes, editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 116. Gale Research, 1992.
63
It seems to have been out by 20...
Textual Features
Carolina Oliphant Lady Nairne
In the traditional version of The Laird o' Cockpen (he's proud and he's great), the laird opts for marriage with a girl of lower rank: this song reinforced the comforting idea that true...
Textual Features
Lady Charlotte Bury
The title-page quotes Jeremy Taylor
on life as a game of cards, involving both skill and luck. The novel's protagonist, Bertha d'Egmont, impulsively elopes with a husband she knows little about, and from this first...
Reception
Catherine Sinclair
Moira Burgess
, writing on Scottish women's fiction, found Beatrice's tone and sentiment a startling departure from Sinclair's earlier work, but concluded that in those disturbing mid-century years of industrial revolution and sudden Irish...
Reception
Mary Ann Kelty
Susan Ferrier
's sister Helen Kinloch
saw Trials: A Tale as a sad comedown after The Favourite of Nature: she joked that it was a trial to read.
Ferrier, Susan, and John Ferrier. Memoir and Correspondence of Susan Ferrier, 1782-1854. Editor Doyle, John Andrew, Eveleigh Nash and Grayson, 1929.
181
Publishing
Lady Charlotte Bury
Susan Ferrier
helped with this first publication since LCB
's second marriage—the first that belongs to the decades of her novelistic career—by submitting it to Blackwood
, her own publisher, as early as January 1820...
Literary responses
Lady Charlotte Bury
Edward Copeland
argues that this text, though designed to ride the wave of the new silver-fork novel, draws its influences from an earlier generation: Frances Burney
, Susan Ferrier
, and Richardson
's Sir Charles...
Literary responses
Susanna Centlivre
SC
is said to have made a very good living from the theatre in the later years of her career, and to have cannily invested her savings in portable property like jewellery and silverware.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Long...
Literary responses
Catherine Sinclair
Timothy C. Baker
has noted that recent scholarship follows CS
's contemporaries in overlooking her adult novels. For the monument-makers, Sinclair's fame rests on a combination of civic and literary achievement; curiously, however, her widely...
Literary responses
Mary Ann Kelty
Reviewers praised this novel for its depiction of character and its intimate knowledge of the human heart.The Monthly Magazine singled out its impeccable morality, suitable for a young and female readership.
qtd. in
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
She herself thought this better than her novels, but Thackeray
satirised it as Heavenly Chords; A Collection of Sacred Strains by Lady Frances Juliana Flummery. Susan Ferrier
agreed with the author that the prayers...
Timeline
2 July 1798: The conservative Lady's Monthly Museum: or...
Writing climate item
2 July 1798
The conservative Lady's Monthly Museum: or polite repository of amusement and instruction published its first number. Sometimes called The Ladies' Monthly Museum . . . it ran until the 1830s.
Watson, George, and Ian Roy Wilson, editors. The New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature. Cambridge University Press, 1969, 5 vols., http://U of A, HSS Ruth N Flr 1 Ref.
Beetham, Margaret. A Magazine of Her Own?: Domesticity and Desire in the Woman’s Magazine, 1800-1914. Routledge, 1996.
216
Pitcher, Edward W. The "Lady’s Monthly Museum". First Series: 1798-1806. Edwin Mellen Press, 2000.
British Library Catalogue. http://explore.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?dscnt=0&tab=local_tab&dstmp=1489778087340&vid=BLVU1&mode=Basic&fromLo.
Texts
Ferrier, Susan. Destiny. Robert Cadell; Whittaker, 1831.
Irvine, James, and Susan Ferrier. “Introduction”. The Inheritance, Three Rivers, 1984, p. v - xv.
Ferrier, Susan. Marriage. William Blackwood; John Murray, 1818, 3 vols.
Ferrier, Susan, and John Ferrier. Memoir and Correspondence of Susan Ferrier, 1782-1854. Editor Doyle, John Andrew, J. Murray, 1898.
Ferrier, Susan, and John Ferrier. Memoir and Correspondence of Susan Ferrier, 1782-1854. Editor Doyle, John Andrew, Eveleigh Nash and Grayson, 1929.
Ferrier, Susan. The Inheritance. W. Blackwood; T. Cadell, 1824.
