THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

importance of the process of learning and judging through which all her heroines pass. Anne Elliot is not only
Austen’s most astute literary critic (she finds it ‘the misfortune of poetry, to be seldom safely enjoyed by those who
enjoyed it completely’), she is also her most discriminating woman character, the one whose intelligence most
effectively balances the merits of conflicting opinions, ideas, impressions, and feelings. It is against Anne’s sunny
‘domestic’ virtues that the world in which she moves so often seems shallow, worldly, petty, and vain. The freedom
which all Austen’s lovers attain is a freedom of action and moral decision worked out, not in a deceptively ‘gracious’
society, but in a post-lapsarian world often unaware that it is in constant need of grace.
Susan Ferrier’s work, which often explores related comic themes, generally lacks Austen’s economy and her
intelligence. Ferrier (1782-1854) is also a distinctively Scottish writer whose novels seem raw and provincial beside
her contemporary's confident urbanity. Marriage (1818) traces the responses to matrimony of two generations of
women, those of Lady Juliana, the rash daughter of an Earl who elopes with a penniless Scots officer, and those of her
twin daughters, the one brought up in London society, the other trained in the rougher, but honester, household of her
Caledonian aunts. Ferrier plays throughout with contradictory attitudes to love, ranging from the old Earl’s dismissal
of the emotion as something ‘now entirely confined to the canaille’, to a final awareness that a woman can indeed be
‘beloved with all the truth and ardour of a noble ingenuous mind, too upright to deceive others, too enlightened to
deceive itself’. Despite the evidence to the contrary — the deceptions, the semblances of affection, the elopements,
and the adulteries — the novel ends with the proclamation of a single ‘happy Marriage’. Deceptions and semblances
also run through the twists and turns of the plot of The Inheritance (1824), a novel which suggests the emotional
dangers of an over-reliance on money as a determiner of the heart.
Ferrier’s modest and often mocking use of the Scots dialect and of Scottish traits is to some extent mirrored in the
work of a more determinedly provincial novelist, John Galt (1779-1839). Galt, well aware of the importance of the
English market for fiction, was not, however, inclined to limit the circulation of his novels to an exclusively Scottish
audience by an excessive use of the vernacular. Scotland, which was beginning to enjoy and exploit the international
celebrity brought to it by the success of the poetry of Burns and Scott, had in 1822 been the object of a state visit by its
new king, George IV (a visit partly stage-managed, tartan and all, by Scott). The King who was not a popular figure
in London, was the first sovereign of the Hanoverian dynasty to visit Edinburgh and this trip to ‘the venerable home
of [his] Royal Ancestors’ proved to be a considerable public-relations success. Galt recalled his own homage to the
King at Holyrood in the somewhat obsequious royal dedication of his most Scottish novel, The Entail (1822). The
Entail is also Galt’s most
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ambitious and carefully shaped work of fiction, darkened as it is by the tragedy which develops from the greed of
Claud Walkinshaw and his determination to keep the estate of Kittlestonheugh together by entailing it on his male
heirs. Galt was himself disinclined to refer to his three slightly earlier and more episodic works — The Ayrshire
Legatees (1820-1), Annals of the Parish (1821),and the secular parallel to the Annals, The Provost (1822) — as
novels, preferring to characterize them as ‘theoretical histories of society, limited ... necessarily to the events of a
circumscribed locality’. This ‘locality’ is, in the case of the last two stories, a small town in western Scotland. In
Annals of the Parish the minister of Dalmailing anecdotally traces the public and private history of his parish from
the time of his induction in 1760 to his resignation in 1810. The second half of the narrative increasingly refers to the
gathering pace of social and political change, from the construction of a cotton mill to the impact of international
events on small-town perceptions. The minister, loyal equally to the Hanoverian throne and to the traditions of the
Presbyterian Church, is troubled by the signs of dissent evident in the establishment of a schismatic chapel and in the
seditious ‘itch of jacobinism’ which irritates the local mill workers. Where the minister accredits both bane and
blessing to the workings of Providence, Provost James Pawkie (whose surname implies that he is ‘sly’) is confident of
his own prowess as a self made man and as the first citizen and chief landowner of Gudetown. As Coleridge, an
admiring early reader of The Provost, acknowledged, the novel is masterly in its evocation of ‘the unconscious,
perfectly natural, Irony of Self delusion’, of a man ‘cheating’ himself into ‘a happy state of constant Self applause’.
Galt’s royalism, and his ready acceptance of the historic fact of the Union with England, is paralleled from a quite
distinct Irish angle in the work of Maria Edgeworth (1767-1849), a writer drawn by circumstance and experience to a
depiction of the cultural divisions inherent in the land settled by her colonizing ancestors. Edgeworth had been born
and educated in England and only returned to her father’s Irish estates in 1782, the year in which the Irish Parliament
won the right to legislate separately from the British Parliament. With her family she had been forced to flee from the
abortive French invasion of 1798, and despite her father’s initially spirited resistance to the Union with Great Britain,
she, like him, acquiesced to its legal enforcement. Maria’s understanding of Ireland was based on a firm, if partisan,
grasp of history, both that of her family and that of the nation. She also possessed a ready enough sympathy with the
oppressed Catholic majority and a complementary, but, to some modern perceptions, contradictory and Spenserian
conviction of the superiority of English manners (Spenser’s View of the Present State of Ireland is one of the works