Walter Scott, the most chivalrous of all writers, brought to an end woman's supremacy in the novel, in 1814. At this time prose fiction was far different from what it was in 1772, when Tobias Smollet died, and much of this difference was due to women. Professor Masson, in his lectures on the novel, gives the names of twenty novelists who wrote between 1789-1814 who are remembered in the history of English literature. "With the exception of Godwin," he writes, "I do not know that any of the male novelists I have mentioned could be put in comparison, in respect of genuine merit, with such novelists of the other sex as Mrs. Radcliffe, Miss Edgeworth, and Miss Austen." It is equally worthy of note that, of the twenty names given, fourteen are women. Although during these years women had developed the historical novel, and had brought the novel of mystery to a high degree of perfection, they left the most enduring stamp on literature as realists, as painters of everyday life and commonplace people. Francis Jeffrey wrote: "It required almost the same courage to get rid of the jargon of fashionable life and the swarms of peers, foundlings, and seducers, that infested our modern fables as it did in those days to sweep away the mythological persons of antiquity, and to introduce characters who spoke and acted like those who were to peruse their adventures." Women awakened interest in the humdrum lives of their neighbours next door, and this without any exaggeration, simply by minute attention to little things, and quick sympathy in the joys and sorrows of others. They described manners and customs; their view of life was largely objective. It is a noteworthy fact that while Scott was casting over all Europe the light of romanticism, the women writers of the time, with but one or two exceptions, were viewing life with the clear vision of Miss Edgeworth and Miss Austen, as if the world obtruded too glaringly upon their eyes to be lost sight of in happy day-dreams. * * * * * Susan Edmonstone Ferrier is better known to-day as the friend of Scott, and an occasional visitor at Abbotsford, than as a successful novelist. She was born at Edinburgh in 1782, where her father, James Ferrier, was Writer to the Signet, and at one time Clerk of Session, Scott being one of his colleagues. That great genius was one of the earliest to appreciate the excellence of her descriptions of Scottish life given in her first book, entitled _Marriage_, published anonymously in 1818. In the conclusion of the _Tales of my Landlord_ he paid the unknown writer this graceful tribute: "There remains behind not only a large harvest, but labourers capable of gathering it in; more than one writer has of late displayed talents of this description, and if the present author, himself a phantom, may be permitted to distinguish a brother, or perhaps a sister, shadow, he would mention in particular the author of the very lively work entitled _Marriage_."