Phebe Gibbes
Encyclopedia
Phebe Gibbes was an 18th -century English
novelist and early feminist. She authored twenty-two books between 1764 and 1790, and is best known for the novels The History of Mr. Francis Clive (1764), The Fruitless Repentance; or, the History of Miss Kitty Le Fever (1769), and The History of Miss Eliza Musgrove (1769). She received recent attention with the scholarly publication of Hartly House Calcutta (1789) in 2007.
for financial support in 1804. As noted in her application, Gibbes, a widow for most of her life, married early and mothered two daughters and one son. One can conjecture that she spent part of her life in British India, as some of her novels, particularly Hartly House, avow a markedly accurate knowledge of Indian lifestyle as perceived through contemporary records. It is also known that Gibbes’ son never returned from a military mission in India, a fact that is manifest in her later writing; she writes in the first lines of Hartly House, “the Eastern world is, as you pronounce it, the grave of thousands”.
The financial mismanagement of Gibbes’ father-in-law, a compulsive gambler, was the eventual cause of her extreme poverty; parental neglect and a strong aversion to gambling are manifest in many of Gibbes' novels.
with an astonishing double-debut in 1764, with the extremely controversial novel, The Life and Adventures of Mr. Francis Clive (1764) and the epistolary, History of Lady Louisa Stroud, and the Honorable Miss Caroline Stretton (1764). Three years after her debut, Gibbes published two novels, The Woman of Fashion; or, the History of Lady Diana Dormer (1767) and The History of Miss Pittsborough (1767), a novel especially lauded by the Critical Review
as “chaste” and “virtuous”. Two years later, Gibbes again created an effusion of work with The History of Miss Somerville (1769); The Fruitless Repentance; or, the History of Miss Kitty Le Fever (1769), and The History of Miss Eliza Musgrove (1769). The Critical Review wrote positively of Miss Eliza Musgrove, citing Gibbes’ novel as “equal in genius to Lennox, Brookes, and Scott.” After a fruitful entrance into the scene of women’s literature, Gibbes continued to produce novels until Hartly House, Calcutta in 1789; Gibbes may potentially have created works into the 1790s, but they are unverified or also attributed to other writers.
Gibbes claims, in her 1804 application to the Royal Literary Fund, a prolific 22 titles; however, only fourteen of Gibbes’ novels (or potential novels) are actually traceable. Like many writers of her time, Gibbes wrote anonymously on almost all of her works, with the exclusion of The Niece; or the History of Sukey Thornby (1788), on which she writes ‘Mrs. P. Gibbes’.
Gibbes’ writing provides very vividly descriptive accounts of the places she visits, namely India and the American continent, often naming the precise titles of the servants and the exact prices for various items; as such, her work provides a key resource for Indologists and scholars who desire personal, from life, accounts of contemporary 18th century experiences.
Gibbes in her later life earned her living ‘by the pen,’ a job considered unfit for a woman – only writing for pleasure was condoned, not for survival (a fact embraced in Elfrida, where the protagonist is harshly admonished for working to earn a living as a musician post-marriage) – and as such, she had no means to interact with the indulgent culture of her youth. Gibbes appears to cherish the epicurean lifestyles of the contemporary upper-class, while also reviling and critiquing the gross materialism
of her era. She often tends toward describing very lushly a material culture, and yet causing her protagonist to reject that culture.
, lack of female education
, acquisitiveness
, gambling
, and personal vanity
. Many of her heroines, particularly Sophia ‘Goldborne’ – a somewhat onomastic name – are stark contrasts to the materialistic, indulgent culture of the time, as discussed above; and yet at the same time, appear to relish female materialism. One can see in this scene in which Gibbes creates a vivid picture of extravagance, this slightly awe-filled distaste at both the foolishness and the power involved in materialism,
One can conclude that these scenes serve to express her distaste for the ‘materialistic’ nature of some English women; and yet, Gibbes finds a power in this ability for women to ‘control’ their spouses or fathers through expenditure.
Gibbes is especially known for her protests against the lack of early education for girls. Gibbes was particularly inspired by the comparatively free lifestyle for women in America, and in fact was sometimes construed as a Republican
. In Her Friendship in a Nunnery; or, The American Fugitive, the narrator, a fourteen year old American girl, is so well-spoken and eloquent that the Critical Review reviled the novel, writing, “what may not be expected from the old men and sages of [America], when its maidens, its babes and sucklings talk, write, and reason thus!” William Enfield
, a well-regarded Unitarian minister and writer, however, applauded her novel as having,
One must also note as particularly feministic, the accidentally bigamous marriage of Elfrida, in the eponymous novel Elfrida, and the incredible death of Hannah, the household servant in Mr. Francis Clive, who suffers a painful and protracted demise after imbibing a faulty abortifacient
(abortion-inducing poultice) from an apothecary when she becomes pregnant with Clive’s child. These kinds of outrageous, yet plausible, situations left Gibbes’ novels as somewhat polemic in the time period; and, clearly, it is hardly precocious to call her an early feminist.
The social protestation of these types of double-standards for males and females amazingly pre-dates those reactionary works of the later feminist writers, such as Mary Hays
and Mary Wollstonecraft
, by nearly forty years. It is unquestionable that the later feminists of the late 18th and early 19th century, particularly Wollstonecraft who reviewed Gibbes’ work with delight, were inspired in part by this prodigal 18th century author.
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
novelist and early feminist. She authored twenty-two books between 1764 and 1790, and is best known for the novels The History of Mr. Francis Clive (1764), The Fruitless Repentance; or, the History of Miss Kitty Le Fever (1769), and The History of Miss Eliza Musgrove (1769). She received recent attention with the scholarly publication of Hartly House Calcutta (1789) in 2007.
Gibbes’ Life
Phebe Gibbes possesses one of the most elusive histories of the 18th-century women writers. Almost all of the information on Gibbes’ life is derived from an application to the Royal Literary FundRoyal Literary Fund
The Royal Literary Fund is a benevolent fund set up to help published British writers in financial difficulties. It was founded by Reverend David Williams in 1790 and has received bequests and donations, including royal patronage, ever since...
for financial support in 1804. As noted in her application, Gibbes, a widow for most of her life, married early and mothered two daughters and one son. One can conjecture that she spent part of her life in British India, as some of her novels, particularly Hartly House, avow a markedly accurate knowledge of Indian lifestyle as perceived through contemporary records. It is also known that Gibbes’ son never returned from a military mission in India, a fact that is manifest in her later writing; she writes in the first lines of Hartly House, “the Eastern world is, as you pronounce it, the grave of thousands”.
The financial mismanagement of Gibbes’ father-in-law, a compulsive gambler, was the eventual cause of her extreme poverty; parental neglect and a strong aversion to gambling are manifest in many of Gibbes' novels.
Writing career
Phebe Gibbes first entered the world of English literatureEnglish literature
English literature is the literature written in the English language, including literature composed in English by writers not necessarily from England; for example, Robert Burns was Scottish, James Joyce was Irish, Joseph Conrad was Polish, Dylan Thomas was Welsh, Edgar Allan Poe was American, J....
with an astonishing double-debut in 1764, with the extremely controversial novel, The Life and Adventures of Mr. Francis Clive (1764) and the epistolary, History of Lady Louisa Stroud, and the Honorable Miss Caroline Stretton (1764). Three years after her debut, Gibbes published two novels, The Woman of Fashion; or, the History of Lady Diana Dormer (1767) and The History of Miss Pittsborough (1767), a novel especially lauded by the Critical Review
The Critical Review
The Critical Review was first edited by Tobias Smollett from 1756 to 1763, and was contributed to by Samuel Johnson, David Hume, John Hunter, and Oliver Goldsmith, until 1817....
as “chaste” and “virtuous”. Two years later, Gibbes again created an effusion of work with The History of Miss Somerville (1769); The Fruitless Repentance; or, the History of Miss Kitty Le Fever (1769), and The History of Miss Eliza Musgrove (1769). The Critical Review wrote positively of Miss Eliza Musgrove, citing Gibbes’ novel as “equal in genius to Lennox, Brookes, and Scott.” After a fruitful entrance into the scene of women’s literature, Gibbes continued to produce novels until Hartly House, Calcutta in 1789; Gibbes may potentially have created works into the 1790s, but they are unverified or also attributed to other writers.
Gibbes claims, in her 1804 application to the Royal Literary Fund, a prolific 22 titles; however, only fourteen of Gibbes’ novels (or potential novels) are actually traceable. Like many writers of her time, Gibbes wrote anonymously on almost all of her works, with the exclusion of The Niece; or the History of Sukey Thornby (1788), on which she writes ‘Mrs. P. Gibbes’.
Gibbes’ writing provides very vividly descriptive accounts of the places she visits, namely India and the American continent, often naming the precise titles of the servants and the exact prices for various items; as such, her work provides a key resource for Indologists and scholars who desire personal, from life, accounts of contemporary 18th century experiences.
Gibbes in her later life earned her living ‘by the pen,’ a job considered unfit for a woman – only writing for pleasure was condoned, not for survival (a fact embraced in Elfrida, where the protagonist is harshly admonished for working to earn a living as a musician post-marriage) – and as such, she had no means to interact with the indulgent culture of her youth. Gibbes appears to cherish the epicurean lifestyles of the contemporary upper-class, while also reviling and critiquing the gross materialism
Materialism
In philosophy, the theory of materialism holds that the only thing that exists is matter; that all things are composed of material and all phenomena are the result of material interactions. In other words, matter is the only substance...
of her era. She often tends toward describing very lushly a material culture, and yet causing her protagonist to reject that culture.
Social Protests
Several contemporary issues surface multiple times in Gibbes’ writing: child neglectChild neglect
Child neglect is defined as:# "the failure of a person responsible for a child’s care and upbringing to safeguard the child’s emotional and physical health and general well-being"...
, lack of female education
Female education
Female education is a catch-all term for a complex of issues and debates surrounding education for females. It includes areas of gender equality and access to education, and its connection to the alleviation of poverty...
, acquisitiveness
Acquisitiveness
Acquisitiveness is a phrenological faculty.-Definition:Acquisitiveness describes the greed to increase one's possessions, to acquire, hoard and save.It can be aimed on material or immaterial fields, depending on the development of other faculties...
, gambling
Gambling
Gambling is the wagering of money or something of material value on an event with an uncertain outcome with the primary intent of winning additional money and/or material goods...
, and personal vanity
Vanity
In conventional parlance, vanity is the excessive belief in one's own abilities or attractiveness to others. Prior to the 14th century it did not have such narcissistic undertones, and merely meant futility. The related term vainglory is now often seen as an archaic synonym for vanity, but...
. Many of her heroines, particularly Sophia ‘Goldborne’ – a somewhat onomastic name – are stark contrasts to the materialistic, indulgent culture of the time, as discussed above; and yet at the same time, appear to relish female materialism. One can see in this scene in which Gibbes creates a vivid picture of extravagance, this slightly awe-filled distaste at both the foolishness and the power involved in materialism,
- “The Europe shops, as you will naturally conclude, are those ware-houses where all the British finery imported is displayed and purchased; and such is the spirit of many ladies upon visiting them, that there have been :instances of their spending 30 or 40,000 rupees [about 5000 pounds] in one morning, for the decoration of their persons; on which account many husbands are observed to turn pale as ashes, on the bare mention of their wives :being seen to enter them: but controul is not a matrimonial rule at Calcutta; and the men are obliged to make the best of their conjugal mortifications.”
One can conclude that these scenes serve to express her distaste for the ‘materialistic’ nature of some English women; and yet, Gibbes finds a power in this ability for women to ‘control’ their spouses or fathers through expenditure.
Gibbes is especially known for her protests against the lack of early education for girls. Gibbes was particularly inspired by the comparatively free lifestyle for women in America, and in fact was sometimes construed as a Republican
Republicanism
Republicanism is the ideology of governing a nation as a republic, where the head of state is appointed by means other than heredity, often elections. The exact meaning of republicanism varies depending on the cultural and historical context...
. In Her Friendship in a Nunnery; or, The American Fugitive, the narrator, a fourteen year old American girl, is so well-spoken and eloquent that the Critical Review reviled the novel, writing, “what may not be expected from the old men and sages of [America], when its maidens, its babes and sucklings talk, write, and reason thus!” William Enfield
William Enfield
William Enfield was a British Unitarian minister who published a bestselling book on elocution entitled The Speaker .-Life:...
, a well-regarded Unitarian minister and writer, however, applauded her novel as having,
- “so much truth… that it merits attention in an age, in which it is become too fashionable for females to receive the last finishing of their education in a convent.”
One must also note as particularly feministic, the accidentally bigamous marriage of Elfrida, in the eponymous novel Elfrida, and the incredible death of Hannah, the household servant in Mr. Francis Clive, who suffers a painful and protracted demise after imbibing a faulty abortifacient
Abortifacient
An abortifacient is a substance that induces abortion. Abortifacients for animals that have mated undesirably are known as mismating shots....
(abortion-inducing poultice) from an apothecary when she becomes pregnant with Clive’s child. These kinds of outrageous, yet plausible, situations left Gibbes’ novels as somewhat polemic in the time period; and, clearly, it is hardly precocious to call her an early feminist.
The social protestation of these types of double-standards for males and females amazingly pre-dates those reactionary works of the later feminist writers, such as Mary Hays
Mary Hays
Mary Hays was an English novelist and feminist.- Early years :Mary Hays was born in Southwark, London on Oct. 13, 1759. Almost nothing is known of her first 17 years. In 1779 she fell in love with John Eccles who lived on Gainsford Street, where she also lived. Their parents opposed the match but...
and Mary Wollstonecraft
Mary Wollstonecraft
Mary Wollstonecraft was an eighteenth-century British writer, philosopher, and advocate of women's rights. During her brief career, she wrote novels, treatises, a travel narrative, a history of the French Revolution, a conduct book, and a children's book...
, by nearly forty years. It is unquestionable that the later feminists of the late 18th and early 19th century, particularly Wollstonecraft who reviewed Gibbes’ work with delight, were inspired in part by this prodigal 18th century author.
List of works
- The Life and Adventures of Mr. Francis Clive (1764)
- History of Lady Louisa Stroud, and the Honorable Miss Caroline Stretton (1764)
- The Woman of Fashion; or, the History of Lady Diana Dormer (1767)
- The History of Miss Pittsborough (1767)
- The History of Miss Somerville (1769)
- The Fruitless Repentance; or, the History of Miss Kitty Le Fever (1769)
- The History of Miss Eliza Musgrove (1769)
- Modern Seduction, or Innocence Betrayed; Consisting of Several Histories of the Principal Magdalens (1777)
- Friendship in a Nunnery; or, The American Fugitive (1778)
- Elfrida; or Paternal Ambition (1786)
- Zoriada: or, Village Annals (1786) – unclear, as this novel is claimed by Gibbes, but had been previously attributed to Anne Hughes.
- The Niece; or the History of Sukey Thornby (1788)
- Harty House, Calcutta (1789)
- Jemima: A Novel (1795) –unclear; attributed in its printing to ‘the author of Zoriada: or, Village Annals.’
- Heaven’s Best Gifts (1798) – unclear, as this novel is also attributed to ‘Mrs. Lucius Phillips’.
Further reading
- Blain, Virginia, Patricial Clements, and Isobel Grundy, eds., The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present (London: Batsford, 1990).
- Foster, William, 'Whoe Wrote Hartly House?"; Bengal Past and Present, 15, pt. 2, no. 30 (1917), pp. 28-9.
- Green, Katherina Sobba, The Courtship Novel 1740-1820: A Feminized Genre. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998.
- Grundy, Isobel, '"the barbarous character we give them": White Women Travelers Report on Other Races', Studies in English Eighteenth Century Culture, 22 (1992), pp. 73–86.
- Grundy, Isobel, '(Re)discovering women's texts', in Women in Literature in Britain, 1700-1800, Vivien Jones, ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 179–96.
- London, April, Women and Propriety in the Eighteenth-Century English Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
- Messenger, Ann, His and Hers, Essays in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1986.
- Nussbaum, Felicity A., Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire in Eighteenth-Century English Narratives. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.
- Pratt, Mary Louise, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge, 1992.
- Rajan, Balachandra, 'Feminizing the Feminine: Early Women Writers on India', in Romanticism, Race and Imperial Culture, 1780-1834, Sonia Hofkosh and Alan Richardson, eds. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996, pp. 49–72.
- Sharpe, Jenny, Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.
- Teltscher, Kate. India Inscribed: European and British Writing on India 1600-1800. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995.
- Turner, Cheryl, Living by the Pen: Women Writers in the Eighteenth Century. London: Routledge, 1992.