Susan Ferrier

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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.
Engraving of Susan Ferrier based on the half-length portrait by Robert Thorburn, 1836. She looks straight forward, wearing a huge lacy bonnet and a large, lacy collar or neckerchief over a dress in shiny fabric. She has a pocket watch on a long chain. A glimpse of landscape is visible behind.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Friends, Associates Henry Peter Baron Brougham
Brougham had a number of friends among women writers. He was at primary school in Edinburgh with Susan Ferrier (who, however, declined to acknowledge him later, probably for political reasons). His political work brought him...
Friends, Associates Sydney Owenson Lady Morgan
They had houses, or mansions, in Tyrone, in Scotland, and at Stanmore Priory near London; they treated the celebrated writer as a kind of household pet, even making fun of her nationalist...
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 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...
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...
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...
Literary responses Lady Charlotte Bury
Susan Ferrier , having helped to ease the novel's passage into print, wrote to one of her sisters with a very early copy, saying that she thought it had beautiful descriptions but too many of...
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...
Friends, Associates Lady Charlotte Bury
An early acquaintance was the future novelist Susan Ferrier (nearly eight years her junior), who often visited Inverary Castle with her father, who was estate manager to Lady Charlotte's father and worked on legal busines...
Literary responses Lady Charlotte Bury
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...
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...
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...
Friends, Associates Eliza Fletcher
Hamilton, herself a conservative, set about de-demonizing EF 's political reputation. She had good success in persuading her friends that Mrs Fletcher was not the ferocious Democrat she had been represented, and that she neither...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Anne Grant
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...
Leisure and Society Elizabeth Jenkins
In wartime lunch hours EJ used to browse in the bookshops of Tottenham Court Road: among items for sale she noticed Susan Ferrier 's The Inheritance, 1824, and one of the fifty privately-printed...

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.