Susanna Gunning

Susanna Gunning, novelist, was buried in the north cloister of Westminster Abbey on 5th September 1800 aged 60. She seems never to have had an inscribed gravestone. It is not clear why she was buried at the Abbey. 

She was a daughter of the Reverend James Minifie and published novels with her sister Margaret and then under her own name in the 1760s. In 1768 she married John Gunning, son of John of Castle Coote in Ireland, who served in the American War of Independence and became Lt. General (he died in Naples in 1797). Their only child Elizabeth (who married Major Plunkett) also became a novelist. Due to a scandal involving forged letters about a supposed marriage engagement John turned them out of his house and they went to France. However on his death bed the General relented and left his estate to them.

Further reading

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography