author

Mrs. (Susannah) Gunning

d. 1800

An eighteenth-century novelist whose life mixed sentimental fiction with very public family drama, she wrote popular novels alone and with her sister Margaret Minifie. Her story later became entangled with the notorious "Gunningiad," a society scandal that kept her name alive well beyond her lifetime.

1 Audiobook

Barford Abbey, a Novel: In a Series of Letters

Barford Abbey, a Novel: In a Series of Letters

by Mrs. (Susannah) Gunning

About the author

Born Susannah Minifie around 1739 or 1740, she was the daughter of the Reverend James Minifie of Somerset and the sister of novelist Margaret Minifie. The two sisters published novels together before she went on to write under her married name, building a reputation as a writer of sentimental fiction in the 1760s and 1770s.

In 1768 she married John Gunning, an army officer who later became a lieutenant general, and their daughter Elizabeth Gunning also became a novelist. Susannah Gunning's later life was overshadowed by a very public 1791 family dispute over Elizabeth's suitors, a scandal remembered by contemporaries as the "Gunningiad." She even published a letter defending herself during the controversy.

She died in London on August 28, 1800, and was buried in the north cloister of Westminster Abbey. Although not much is known about her private life before literary success, the outline that remains is striking: a working novelist, a collaborative sister, a literary mother, and a woman who found herself at the center of Georgian gossip.