[3] Her mother was the daughter of William Smithies, a goldsmith and jeweller to King George I. Vice-Admiral Samuel Reeve (c. 1733–1803) was her brother.

The first edition, entitled The Old English Baron, was dedicated to the daughter of Samuel Richardson, who is said to have helped Reeve to revise and correct it.

One story in the work, "The History of Charoba, Queen of Egypt", inspired Walter Savage Landor's first major piece, Gebir (1798).

[7] Written in response to Walpole's Castle of Otranto, The Old English Baron was a major influence on the development of Gothic fiction, gaining popularity for the genre in universities and among general readers.

First there is the reinforcement of the Gothic narrative framework as one that focuses on expanding the imaginative domain to include the supernatural, but without losing the realism that marks the novel that Walpole pioneered.

She spurned specific aspects of Walpole's style, such as his tendency to blend in humour or comedy that diminishes the Gothic tale's ability to induce fear.

In 1777, Reeve enumerated Walpole's excesses: a sword so large as to require an hundred men to lift it; a helmet that by its own weight forces a passage through a court-yard into an arched vault, big enough for a man to go through; a picture that walks out of its frame; a skeleton ghost in a hermit's cowl...[13]Although successive Gothic writers did not fully heed Reeve's emotional realism, she posited a framework that keeps Gothic fiction within the realm of the probable.