The Novels of Walter Scott and his Literary Relations: Mary Brunton, Susan Ferrier and Christian Johnstone by Andrew Monnickendam (review)

Abstract

Georg Luka¤ cs may have dismissed the supposedly second-rate novelists who were forerunners of Walter Scott’s ¢ction. But at least since Ina Ferris’s The Achievement of Literary Authority ("ææ"), Peter Garside’s ‘Popular Fiction and National Tale’ (also "ææ") and, a few years later, Katie Trumpener’s Bardic Nationalism ("ææ ), scholars have thought it important to recover the works of Scott’s fellow writers and to connect the form and features of his popular brand of historical ¢ction to the rich literary ¢eld of Romantic Scotland. Andrew Monnickendam’s book, The Novels of Walter Scott and his Literary Relations, can be added to this growing list of titles. He surveys the work of three female writers of the period ^ Mary Brunton, Susan Ferrier and Christian Johnstone ^ in order to highlight ‘a rather di¡erent Great Unknown than we have been accustomed to’ (Æ). Monnickendam cites Ian Duncan’s recent book, Scott’s Shadow: the Novel in Romantic Edinburgh (Æ ), as his immediate inspiration. As Duncan reads Scott in relation to writers such as James Hogg and John Galt, so Monnickendam suggests that the writers in his study share a set of concerns, or ‘similar situations’ (" ), with their famous fellow author. The novels of Brunton, Ferrier and Johnstone, he says, ‘illuminate, inform, engage with [and] in£uence’ (Æ ) Scott in ways that challenge the familiar account of his ¢ction’s assumed ideological stability. The line of in£uence or engagement drawn in Walter Scott and his Literary Relations, however, is far less direct than it is in Duncan’s book. Monnickendam focuses on a group of novels mostly written in the few years before or after Waverley (" "a), including Brunton’s Self-Control (" ""), Discipline (" "a) and the posthumously published Emmeline and Other Pieces (" "æ); Ferrier’s Marriage (" " ), The Inheritance (" Æa) and Destiny (" "); and Johnstone’s Clan-Albin (" " ) and Elizabeth de Bruce (" Æ ). Each of the ¢rst three chapters is devoted to one of the three writers and each chapter is divided into similar sections: ‘Literary persona’; ‘Heroinism’ (a word used by Johnstone in Clan-Albin); ‘Parents and education’; ‘Location’; and ‘Cul-de-sac’. Monnickendam provides careful readings of individual literary works and elaborates upon the conditions that shaped the ¢ction and the