Susannah Gunning

SG began in the mid eighteenth century, at an early age, as a mediocre sentimental novelist: snobbish, stylistically over-elaborate, centring her plots on wished-for ascent to the nobility, and addressing the reader with girlish coyness. Her later work, produced after a silence of years, is more confident, relaxed, and inventive. She also wrote poetry. Her coded writings about her tortured family relationships, though marred by over-writing, provide a fascinating picture of the conflicts resulting from upward mobility in a tightly stratified society.