Mrs aeneas gunn biography

Australian novelist

Jeannie GunnOBE (pen name, Mrs Aeneas Gunn) (5 June 1870 – 9 June 1961) was an Australian novelist, teacher and Returned and Services League of Australia (RSL) volunteer.^[1]

Life

Jeannie Taylor was born in Carlton, Melbourne, the last of five children of Thomas Johnstone Taylor.

Taylor was a Baptist minister who went into business and later worked on the Melbourne Argus.^[1] Matriculating through Melbourne University after being educated at home, she ran a school with her sisters between 1889 and 1896, after which she worked as a visiting teacher.

On New Year's Eve 1901, she married the explorer, pastoralist and journalist Aeneas James Gunn, in the Presbyterian Church.^[2] Shortly after, in early 1902, they travelled to Darwin (then called Palmerston) and then to Elsey, an outlying cattle station on the Roper River, near the current town of Mataranka.

After a year at the Elsey, Jeanni