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  • The Novels of Walter Scott and his Literary Relations: Mary Brunton, Susan Ferrier and Christian Johnstone by Andrew Monnickendam
  • Tony Jarrells
The Novels of Walter Scott and his Literary Relations: Mary Brunton, Susan Ferrier and Christian Johnstone. By Andrew Monnickendam. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. 9781137276544. 216­pp. £50.00.

Georg Lukaács may have dismissed the supposedly second-rate novelists who were forerunners of Walter Scott's fiction. But at least since Ina Ferris's The Achievement of Literary Authority (1991), Peter Garside's 'Popular Fiction and National Tale' (also 1991) and, a few years later, Katie Trumpener's Bardic Nationalism (1997), 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 fiction to the rich literary field 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 different Great Unknown than we have been accustomed to' (2). Monnickendam cites Ian Duncan's recent book, Scott's Shadow: the Novel in Romantic Edinburgh (2007), 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' (15), with their famous fellow author. The novels of Brunton, Ferrier and Johnstone, he says, 'illuminate, inform, engage with [and] influence' (23) Scott in ways that challenge the familiar account of his fiction's assumed ideological stability.

The line of influence 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 (1814), including Brunton's Self-Control (1811), Discipline (1814) and the posthumously published Emmeline and Other Pieces (1819); Ferrier's Marriage (1818­), The Inheritance (1824) and Destiny (1831); and Johnstone's Clan-Albin (1815) and Elizabeth de Bruce (1827). Each of the first 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 fiction and the [End Page 115] different authorial personae. He finds a much livelier and subversive voice in Brunton's novels, for instance, than comes through in the memoir written by Brunton's pious husband that frames her last, posthumous, publication. And he reads Ferrier's first and most famous novel, Marriage, as a 'translation' (89) of Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). A fourth chapter, on Scott, then establishes the line of relations between all four novelists according to a set of shared themes: religion, desire, heroinism, violence and union.

Monnickendam does not argue, as Trumpener does, that Scott borrowed features and character names from novels published before his own Waverley. Nor does he suggest, as Duncan does, that in writing on a common subject — the Covenanting wars, say — Scott seriously engaged the work of his contemporaries, subtly changing his own style and approach to history in the process. The Scott novel Monnickendam reads closely is Waverley. Given the publication dates of the works he discusses in his first three chapters, there can be no influence or direct engagement except in the case of Brunton's Self-Control — and Monnickendam does not try to argue that Brunton somehow influenced Scott (though he does explain that Brunton — and the other two writers — read and reacted to Scott). Instead, the novels of Brunton, Ferrier and Johnstone become a kind of zero-degree mark against which the ideological temperature of Scott can be (re)taken. 'The women writers certainly have different opinions about key matters', writes Monnickendam, 'but what they share is a high degree of certainty about what is not right...

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