As novelists, Jane Austen and Sir Walter Scott have long been contrasted; while she painted exquisite miniatures of the minutiae of life among the English gentry, he used a broad brush and canvas to describe the epic of Scotland's past. Susan Ferrier, a native of Edinburgh and a friend of Scott's, took on the task of describing Scottish manners in her three novels and is thus more akin to Austen and to the Irish novelist Maria Edgeworth than to her countryman. Her works reached a large audience, were translated into French, and were adapted for the stage. Their public success was aided in part by the vogue for matters Scottish instigated by Scott's Waverley novels, but readers chiefly admired the interesting situations and quirky characters that Ferrier invented and enlivened with a satiric eye of the first order. Her novels have fared less well with modern readers, as...