First edition in three volumes - 1818
I first read Marriage in October 2019 (I bought the second edition on 23rd September 2019 for £150) and, to be honest, I had forgotten huge chunks of the story. Rather like her contemporaries, Brunton and Scott, the three volumes could have been trimmed down to two and the tale would have benefitted from it. We live in a different age; yes, we still have leisure time (particularly during this debilitating 'lock-down') but there is less of it and 'life' has got much faster. Other media, especially television, seem to assume one's attention span is minute and deliver up staccato scenes for our amusement.
There are other problems with Ferrier's work (increasingly so in her later novels) - her heroines, if not perfect, believe in God and have boring Christian attributes. Mary Douglas is just too saint-like, annoyingly obedient and bordering on the insipid.
Susan E. Ferrier (1782 - 1854)
For most of Volume I, the story is concerned with an English heiress, Lady Juliana. Her father, Lord Courtland, has fixed views on wedded state: she shall marry for the purpose for which matrimony was ordained amongst people of birth - that is, for the aggrandizement of her family, the extending of their political influence - for becoming, in short, the depository of their mutual interest. His seventeen year-old daughter refuses to consider the Duke of -- and elopes with a penniless Scot, Henry Douglas. At the end of two months, the enamoured husband began to suspect, that the lips of his "angel Julia" could utter very silly things... Which she continues to do until the end of the tale and Volume III. Lady Juliana is frightful! She hates the dreary muirs, and rugged mountains; she hates Scotland; she hates the whole Douglas clan. Rather like recorded medieval nuns, she appeared only to love her pet animals. Mental vacuity...wayward inclinations, variable temper, and wretched inanity of this poor victim of indulgence are all the sad fruits of a fashionable education.
In fact, the novel spells out the consequences of poor education for women - Lady Juliana was badly educated and she raises Adelaide, the daughter she takes with her when she flees to England, to be like her - vain, selfish and foolish. At eighteen, Adelaide Douglas was as heartless and ambitious as she was beautiful an accomplished - but the surface was covered with flowers, and who would have thought of analysing the soil? Her heart, seared by selfishness and vanity, was incapable of loving anything in which self had no share... The various Douglas women at Glenfern Castle are also poorly educated - but through lack of rather than badly.
Ranged against the appalling, empty-headed Lady Juliana and her daughter, are the thoroughly good Mrs Douglas and her niece Mary (Lady Juliana's cast-off daughter and Adelaide's twin). Mrs Douglas (née Alicia Malcolm) was a rational, cheerful, and sweet tempered girl, with a fine formed person [who had] a deep and strong sense of religion. It is to her care that Mary is given. The author also hands to both many of the purple passages that can irritate the modern reader - to engraft into her infant soul the purest principles of religion, was therefore the chief aim of Mary's preceptress... from the Bible alone was she taught the duties of morality... Thus, when Mary, now over eighteen, is sent to England and her mother for her health, it was chalk meeting cheese. Sheer pathos when they actually meet: Mary faints, opens her eyes and faintly articulated, "My mother!" "Mother! What a hideous vulgar appellation!" thought the fashionable parent to herself...
As with some of the minor characters in Scott and Brunton, the Douglas aunts - Jacky, Grizzy and Nicky - are simply tiresome, not only to Juliana but to most present-day readers. Their letters to Mary were especially irritating! I kept thinking that Ferrier was simply describing women she actually knew in Edinburgh, amongst the few hundred people who formed the social elite in the capital city. As for Belle, Becky, Betty, Baby and Beeny - Mary's Scottish cousins, they are merely names on a page. Lady MacLaughlan does come alive, if in a rather exaggerated way: her features were finely formed, marked, and expressive; and in spite of her ridiculous dress and eccentric manners, an air of dignity was diffused over her whole person... As for her husband, Sir Sampson - 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...(later, sat at dinner) a small fly cap of antique lace was scarcely perceptible on the summit of a stupendous frizzled toupee, hemmed in on each side by large curls. - I couldn't get a grip on him!
What saves the novel from becoming a self-righteous paean for solid education and being guided by God at every moment, are the regular injections of humour. Admittedly, some do not travel well over the centuries, but on other occasions there are genuinely comic moments. The Guffaws,(one of the many ill-assorted couples in this world - joined, not matched) where Mary and her father spend the night on their way to Edinburgh, raise a few chuckles; Mrs. Macshake in Edinburgh; Mrs Downe Wright and Lady Matilda Sefton in London; and Mrs Fox, Mrs Bluemits and Mrs Pullens (née Flora Macfuss) in Bath are also well-drawn amusing characters, even if it is to laugh at them.
Moreover, cousin Lady Emily often saves the day - telling Mary to brighten up and sending shafts of wit and contempt at Lady Juliana and Adelaide. She is flawed - being too critical, too quick to speak her mind, too independent, too witty, but she is alive. The men - from the ghastly, peevish, greedy gourmand Dr. Redgill, through Lord Lindore, the Duke of Altamont and Lord Glenallen, to Colonel Charles Lennox and Edward Douglas - can be viewed as different characters, particularly Redgill, but none light the spark of interest we have for the ladies.
Two final points:
The poor old Methodists get it again: Upon my soul, you will be taken for a Methodist, Mary, if you talk in this manner...
Is Ferrier congratulating herself, when she writes: Indeed, it is generally admitted, that the letters of single ladies are infinitely more lively and entertaining than those of married ones - a fact which can neither be denied nor accounted for.
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