author
Mrs. (Susannah) Gunning
d. 1800
An eighteenth-century British novelist whose life mixed popular fiction with real social scandal, she wrote with her sister early on and later returned to fiction on her own. Her career is often remembered both for sentimental novels and for the public drama that swirled around her family in the 1790s.
1 Audiobook
Barford Abbey, a Novel: In a Series of Letters
by Mrs. (Susannah) Gunning
About the author
Born Susannah Minifie around 1740, she became a British writer and novelist, later known as Mrs. Gunning after her 1768 marriage to John Gunning. She was part of a literary family: her sister was Margaret Minifie, with whom she published early work.
Her novels belong to the world of eighteenth-century sentimental and society fiction. Reference sources describe her as active first in collaboration with her sister and then, after a quieter period, as a novelist in her own right. She died in London on August 28, 1800.
She is also remembered for the notoriety that touched her household in 1791, when a highly public dispute involving her daughter Elizabeth Gunning became a society scandal. That mix of authorship, family drama, and fashionable literary ambition has kept her name alive in accounts of the period.