Elizabeth Gunning (1769–1823)

Elizabeth Gunning, later Plunkett, was the daughter of novelist Susannah Gunning and her husband John Gunning. By all accounts, she was accomplished and beautiful. According to Janet Todd (British Women Writers, 1989), it seems likely that her mother and her aunt Margaret, who wrote two novels together, spurred her on to produce her early novels, The Packet (1794) and Lord Fitzhenry (1794). In the 1790s, both mother and daughter wrote novels set in Wales. Elizabeth eventually surpassed her mother in sheer literary quantity by publishing nine novels, two collections of children's stories, five translations (or "alterations") of French works, and one version of a French play, The Wife with Two Husbands. She translated Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds (Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes) by Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle in 1808. Before her 1803 marriage to John Plunkett, an Irish army officer, Elizabeth was involved in a public scandal. When she reached adulthood, a family breach occurred over her potential marriage partner. When she chose her mother's preference for a suitor over her father's, he turned both Susannah and Elizabeth out of the house. Susannah issued a public letter to the Duke of Argyll in defense of her daughter. The scandal grew further to such proportions that it became fodder for the press, with English writer Horace Walpole referring to the incident as "Gunninghiad."