This wildly popular romance appeared just as the Scottish novel was ascending with pride to the level of acclaim previously reserved primarily for English novels. MARRIAGE is an intergenerational drama on the question of marriage for love or marriage by family arrangement. That core conflict is bluntly laid out by the heroine's father, who says, "I'll suffer no daughter of mine to play the fool with her heart, indeed! She shall marry for the purpose for which matrimony was ordained amongst people of birth—that is, for the aggrandisement of her family, the extending of their political influence—for becoming, in short, the depository of their mutual interest. These are the only purposes for which persons of rank ever think of marriage. And pray, what has your heart to say to that?"

While Walter Scott, through his 1814 book WAVERLEY, is generally credited with the rise of the Scottish novel, "the most significant Scottish novelists before WAVERLEY were women" (Oxford History of the Novel in English, 325). Ferrier's novel, though published in 1818, was first composed in 1810. Scott himself called Ferrier his "sister shadow," remarking that she was "the most worthy to gather in the large harvest of Scottish fiction" (quoted in McDermid).

MARRIAGE was published anonymously, in part because a woman of Ferrier's class publishing under her name would have been an impropriety for her position (Austen's works were also published anonymously), but also in part because she was from a very small circle of the Edinburgh elite, some of whom became recognizable characters in her fiction. (Finding the novel so good, many of course immediately attributed it to her more famous male counterpart, Walter Scott.) The novel captures Scottish high society during the Regency with all the wit modern readers now expect in historical regency romances. Ferrier's novel is also unusual for exploring the lives of couples after marriage, demonstrating that an HEA isn't always the inevitable result of a good match, but must still be worked towards.

Ferrier, often called "the Scottish Jane Austen," is typically compared with Austen in her satirical eye. But as Val McDermid notes, Ferrier's "world includes the servants and much more domestic detail than Austen, and this makes for a richer portrayal of the period." Ferrier also includes examples of characters speaking in Scots language. These distinguishing characteristics of her work moved beyond the strengths of Austen and anticipated the work of Dickens, depicting working-class lives as well as those of the aristocracy. "It is her subaltern Scots voices and characters that are richer, more robust, and often outrageously funny" (Norquay 59).

One of only 1500 copies printed, which sold out within six months: according to Robert Lee Wolff, it is the rarest of her books.

Read more: Peter Garside and Karen O'Brien (editors), The Oxford History of the Novel in English volume 2: English and British Fiction 1750-1820; Val McDermid, introduction to the 2017 edition of Marriage; Glenda Norquay (editor), The Edinburgh Companion to Scottish Women's Writing; Wolff, Nineteenth-Century Fiction: A Bibliographical Catalogue, 2236.