Phebe Gibbes


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, The Fruitless Repentance; or, the History of Miss Kitty Le Fever, and The History of Miss Eliza Musgrove. She received recent attention with the scholarly publication of Hartly House Calcutta in 2007.

Biography

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 Fund 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.

Career

Author

Gibbes first entered the world of English literature with a double-debut in 1764: the controversial The Life and Adventures of Mr. Francis Clive and the epistolary novel, History of Lady Louisa Stroud, and the Honorable Miss Caroline Stretton. Three years after her debut, Gibbes published two novels, The Woman of Fashion; or, the History of Lady Diana Dormer and The History of Miss Pittsborough, a novel especially lauded by the Critical Review as "chaste" and "virtuous". Two years later, Gibbes published The History of Miss Somerville ; The Fruitless Repentance; or, the History of Miss Kitty Le Fever, and The History of Miss Eliza Musgrove. The Critical Review wrote positively of Miss Eliza Musgrove, citing Gibbes' novel as "equal in genius to Lennox, Brookes, and Scott." Gibbes continued to produce novels until Hartly House, Calcutta in 1789; she may have created works into the 1790s, but if so they are unverified or also attributed to other writers.
Gibbes claims, in her 1804 application to the Royal Literary Fund, some 22 titles; but only 14 of Gibbes' novels are actually traceable. Like many writers of her time, she wrote anonymously, with the exception of The Niece; or the History of Sukey Thornby, which she signed "Mrs. P. Gibbes".
Gibbes’ writing provides descriptive accounts of her visits to India and the American continent. She names the precise titles of the servants and the exact prices of items. Her work therefore provides a resource for Indologists.
Gibbes in her later life earned her living by writing. She appears to cherish the epicurean lifestyles of the contemporary upper-class, while also critiquing the gross materialism of her era. She often describes a lush material culture, and at the same time causes her protagonist to reject that culture.

Social protests

Several contemporary issues surface multiple times in Gibbes' writing: child neglect, 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 , 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 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.

Selected works