Publicity, Privacy, and the Power of Fiction in the Gunning Letters

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, while Londoners were denouncing Helen Maria Williams's Letter Written in France in the Summer 1790, to a Friend in England (1791) and Jane Austen had perhaps begun to conceive her early, unpublished epistolary novel, posthumously titled Lady Susan (1871). 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. This trial is counterbalanced by that of General Gunning for adultery that took place in 1792. The corpus includes a published "open letter" by Mrs Gunning to the Duke of Argyll; a response by her cousin, Mr Bowen; an apology for the life and conduct of General Gunning; reviews of these publications in newspapers; letters by others (for example, Walpole) commenting on the letters and the affair; and some of Gunning's epistolary fictions before and after the fact. Disentangling the Gordian knot of accusations and counter-accusations will contribute a chapter to our understanding of this prolific author of epistolary fiction in the period, 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 Susannah 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.

Susannah Gunning's Novels of Sentiment

Though none of her novels has yet been re-edited in a modern edition, the works and life of Susannah Minifie Gunning (1740?–1800) continue to draw the attention of scholars of the eighteenth-century English novel. The most extensive analysis is by Janet Todd, who pairs Minifie (who co-authored with her sister, Margaret) with Frances Brooke under the rubric of the "fantasy of sensibility" typical of the novels of the 1760s and 1770s. In the Minifie novels, "men instantly respond to the female gesture or 'motion' and 'involuntarily' drop down on their knees at displays of femininity, now far more powerful than the imagined heroics of the demanding heroines of Charlotte Lennox's Arabella. Samuel Richardson's Clarissa had achieved this devotion but only when she was dying or dead; the Minifie heroines are 'soul-inspiring' at first glance and the heroine of Coombe Wood is given devotion without any effort beyond a posture of distress."¹ Though Richardson's epistolary novel Clarissa, whose virtuous heroine is raped and chooses self-willed death over marriage or prosecution, had appeared in 1748, it remained a touchstone for discussions of both sentiment and rakish behaviour in the period under discussion. Betty Schellenberg's catalogue of those passages of the Minifie novels chosen for citation by the Critical Review contradicts Todd's finding—the original Clarissean deathbed scene has been preserved: "the passages chosen as 'best' are almost always extremely pathetic scenes of wronged young women on their deathbeds; where 'humour' is favored, it is of the sort that exposes the social faults of the card-playing widow, or the selfish bachelor."²

The increasing use of and value accorded to sentimentality in the eighteenth century, as Patricia Meyer Spacks has argued, bears an intimate relation to developing notions of privacy, which in turn had ramifications in law and policy. To give one example, in their detailed account of the sensational trial of the Perreau brothers for forgery in 1775, Donna T. Andrew and Randall McGowen argue that the brothers were inserted into the framework of sentimental fiction:

Throughout their accounts [of how they had been duped in their innocence by an evil accomplice] the brothers employed a sentimental idiom that was common parlance in their day. They were both, in their...