Ferrier was awarded a Bachelor of Arts Degree with Honours in London, and a PhD in New Zealand, at the University of Auckland.
[1] The title of her doctoral thesis was The earlier poetry of D. H. Lawrence: a variorum text, comprising all extant incunabula and published poems up to and including the year 1919.
[2] Ferrier helped establish the International Socialist Tendency in Australia in the 1970s,[3] and was a prominent activist in various democratic rights struggles in Queensland from the 1970s.
[7] Amongst her many other published works, Ferrier has authored Jean Devanny: Romantic Revolutionary (Melbourne University Press, 1999).
[8] She has also edited Ferrier's 1992 book Gender, Politics and Fiction was criticised as using orthodox Marxist doctrine, the phenomenology of Paul Feyerabend and Thomas Kuhn, the post-structuralist work of Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze into an "epistemic certainty".