Susan Edmonstone Ferrier - Life

Life

Susan Ferrier was the daughter of James Ferrier (1744–1829), writer to the signet and one of the principal clerks of the Court of Session, in which office he was the colleague of Sir Walter Scott, and his wife Helen (1741–1797), daughter of Robert Coutts, a farmer near Montrose. Her father came from Linlithgow. She was probably born at Lady Stair's Close, Edinburgh, as the ninth of ten surviving children, but the family moved in 1784 into 11 George Street in the New Town.

Ferrier was educated privately, but came to know through her family many notable Edinburgh people, including Scott and the novelist Henry Mackenzie. Her father first took her in 1797 to Inveraray, home of his client and patron John Campbell, 5th Duke of Argyll, where she became a friend of the family, especially of a granddaughter, Charlotte Clavering (died 1841), with whom she corresponded and who was initially involved in the writing of Ferrier's first novel Marriage, although in the end Clavering's contribution to it was limited to the section entitled 'The History of Mrs Douglas'. Some of the letters between them can be found in the front matter of a six-volume edition of the novels.

Susan Ferrier kept house for her father after her mother died and three older sisters had got married. Her eldest brother, incidentally, married the sister of John Wilson, who wrote under the pseudonym Christopher North. Like many well-to-do Edinburgh families, they took a house outside the city in the summer, East Morningside House, where The Inheritance was written. Although she still wished her work to remain anonymous, her identity was widely known by then. She visited Scott at Ashestiel near Montrose in 1811 and at his new house Abbotsford in 1829 and 1831. They enjoyed each other's company: he wrote of her "This gifted personage besides having great talents has conversation the least exigeant of any author, female at least …, simple, full of humour, and exceedingly ready at repartee, and all this without the least affectation of the blue stocking." He mentioned her in the same sentence as Maria Edgeworth and Frances Burney in 1825. Ferrier's account of the visits was eventually published posthumously in the magazine Temple Bar (1874).

Ferrier's own tastes in literature appear in her correspondence. She was an admirer of Jane Austen and of Scott (although she had reservations about some works of his), but scorned John Galt and John Gibson Lockhart. The last of several visits to London was paid in 1830 to see an oculist, when she stayed for a few days at the villa of Lord Casilis in Isleworth, the model for the house known as Woodlands in Destiny.

Brought up in the Church of Scotland, Ferrier joined the Free Church after the Disruption of 1843. She died on 5 November 1854 at a brother's house at 38 Albany Street, Edinburgh, and was buried in St Cuthbert's Churchyard.