Publicity, Privacy, and the Power of Fiction in the Gunning Letters
Thomas O. Beebee, Pennsylvania State University
Volume 20, no. 1, Fall 2007
©McMaster University, 2015. All articles published on the Eighteenth-Century Fiction website are protected by copyright held by Eighteenth-Century Fiction, a journal published by the Faculty of Humanities at McMaster University.
ABSTRACT
In this article I examine a nexus of letters by and about the novelist Susannah Minifie Gunning and her daughter that circulated in England in 1791 and 1792. The letters and accompanying texts carry out a trial in print — dubbed the “Gunninghiad” by Horace Walpole — of the mother, daughter, and eventually the father, General Gunning, for allegedly inventing the daughter’s engagement to the Marquis of Blandford. Disentangling the Gordian knot of accusations and counter-accusations in the Gunninghiad contributes to our understanding of Gunning, as well as throwing light on the complex relationships between public and private, fictional and genuine in this era, and on how the instrument of correspondence lies at the crux of the tensions and complicities between these spheres. I begin with a review of Gunning’s literary career before the marriage crisis, relate her novels to the instrumentalization of sentiment in the period, and examine the role of correspondence in the sentimentalized public sphere, before proceeding to the Gunninghiad itself.
Other ECF articles on the topic of “Epistolary Fiction” include:
“Piety and Popishness”: Tolerance and the Epistolary Reaction to Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison
by PATRICK MELLO (ECF 25.3, Spring 2013)
Jane Austen as Editor: Letters on Fiction and the Cancelled Chapters of Persuasion
by KATIE GEMMILL (ECF 24.1, Fall 2011)
(Love) Letters: Madeleine de Scudéry and the Epistolary Impulse
by JOAN DEJEAN (ECF 22.3, Spring 2010)
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