Susan Ferrier’s first novel, Marriage, has been labeled “shrewdly observant” by one critic and a novel “justified by its painting of Scottish manners” by another. Compared to her contemporaries Maria Edgeworth and Jane Austen, Ferrier develops her plot mostly within the domestic scene. As the title suggests, the book does focus on the institution of marriage, framed within two generations of the same family. That double focus is handled with much humor and acute detail, but its format flaws the plot.

Readers reach the middle of a very long novel and suddenly find that almost 18 years have passed, the male protagonist from the first portion of the novel has disappeared to India, two Scottish aunts allowed ample page space have also been removed, and the twin teenage daughters of the original female protagonist occupy the spotlight. The transition proves jarring, as does Ferrier’s attitude toward her female characters. Many are caricatures, which exist easily in a satire, but need softening for a romance. While they add humor to the presentation, they also jar the reader’s sensibility, their idiosyncrasies proving more annoying than entertaining.

The novel opens with the introduction of Lady Juliana, the egoistic sole daughter of the Earl of Courtland, who has been schooled in the demands of high society and its rewards. An uneducated woman, ignorant of life beyond her social circle, her life’s goal is a suitable husband. She is engaged by arrangement to an elderly aristocrat for whom she has no feelings. Desperate for love and attention, she elopes to Scotland with Harry Douglas, a handsome military officer, born in Scotland but raised in England by a wealthy patron.

Predictably, as the honeymoon period ends, Douglas learns his expected prospects have evaporated due to his absence from military duty, while Juliana has been disinherited by the earl. The near-destitute couple must live in Scotland with Douglas’s father, a group of eccentric aunts, and slightly less eccentric cousins. Juliana, who has no concept of poverty and cares more for her dogs than humans, expects to be entertained in a great Scottish estate, at her father-in-law’s Highland home, the castle of Glenfern. When she discovers the frontier-like appointments of the so-called “castle,” she is dismayed. She treats the aunts like servants, making her needs the primary concerns of the castle, much to the chagrin of the laird, who recognizes her as a weak and silly woman. She acts condescendingly toward everyone except her sister-in-law, Mrs. Douglas, who eventually tells her tale of turning away from the love of her life to make a steady union with Harry’s older brother.

Conditions disintegrate, as Juliana understands they will spend months, if not years, taking advantage of old Mr. Douglas’s hospitality. She celebrates Harry’s taking control of a nearby farm until she discovers its poor condition, although she is heartened when she sees the cheerful and attractive results of the years of work that Mrs. Douglas and her husband have achieved at their home. Eventually she gives birth to twins, rejects both of them as too demanding, and gives the weaker twin, Mary, to Mrs. Douglas.

When Juliana and Harry return to England, she gives birth to a son, Edward, and moves in with her brother, Frederick Lindore, Lord Courtland, who has inherited their father’s estate, and he basically raises her daughter, Adelaide, with his own son and daughter, Emily Lindore. At this point in the story, Harry, who has regained his patron’s good favor, washes his hands of his difficult and haughty wife and leaves the country in service, terminating his relationship with his wife “in an eternal farewell.”

Within a few pages, about eighteen years have passed, during which time a number of events have occurred. Lady Emily has, at age six, declared plans to marry her cousin, Edward Douglas, and later matured into a young woman “as insupportably natural and sincere as she was beautiful and piquante”; Adelaide has become “as heartless and ambitious as she was beautiful and accomplished”; and the lovely and wise Mary has become depressed and ill. When her doctor prescribes time in the English air, Mary joins her twin and her cousins in England, received coldly by her own mother.

During the remainder of the novel, all three young women pursue husbands, their experiences differing as widely as their personalities. Adelaide marries at first the Duke of Altamont for his wealth, despite his stodginess and old age. Juliana encourages that union and simultaneously discourages Mary in her pursuit of the not-so-wealthy, but far more congenial and loving, Colonel Charles Lennox. Emily follows through on her plans to marry Edward Douglas, cousin to Mary and Adelaide and judged “a perfect model of youthful beauty . . . handsome, brave, good-hearted, and good-humoured,” but not clever.

Emily enjoys the only marriage not edged with melodrama and protest, a fact that disappoints her romantic nature in some ways, as she explains to Mary: “Here am I, languishing for a little opposition to my love. My marriage will be quite an insipid, every-day affair; I yawn already to think of it.” Adelaide survives only a year with the duke and ends up running away with Lord Lindore, Emily’s brother, “vainly hoping to find peace and joy amid guilt and infamy.”

Juliana concludes the novel by moving to the South of France, having never shown Mary any affection, where she is joined by the likewise vain Adelaide, an outcast of society, and an “object of indifference even to him for whom she had abandoned all.” Mary will never see her mother again but enjoys the love of her Scottish family and her husband.

As George Douglas notes, Ferrier’s tone may be the novel’s greatest weakness. It lacks compassion or sympathy for her own characters, which suffer through an unrealistically uncompromising world. While everyone meets their challenges in life, most humans may take comfort from fellow sufferers, or find redemption in some small aspect of the human condition. This is not true in the case of Lady Juliana, who, while a victim herself, never garners ready sympathy. She is received by the reader in exactly the manner Ferrier draws her: as a nasty, contemptible, vacuous, and spoiled Englishwoman, whom no reader would want to encounter in the flesh.

Bibliography
Kirkpatrick, Kathryn. Introduction to Marriage by Susan Ferrier. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Categories: British Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis

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