Phebe Gibbes

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PG was an eighteenth-century novelist (of great gifts but extreme obscurity), who also wrote (from financial need) drama and periodical essays, and projected a sociological study of the lower classes. Her canon is, like most information about her, full of uncertainties; it has generally been assumed, however, that applicants to the Royal Literary Fund told the truth about what they had written.
  • BirthName: Phebe French
  • Married: Gibbes
  • Indexed: Mrs Lucius Phillips

Milestones

18 March 1736

PG may have been the Phebe French born on this day in Peartree Alley in Shoreditch to Martha and Anthony French. But she may instead have been born to Sarah and Thomas French of Edge Hill in Warwickshire, close to where she was living in 1761.
Ancestry.co.uk. http://www.ancestry.co.uk.

By April 1764

PG published anonymously a novel entitled The Life and Adventures of Mr. Francis Clive, one of two works she issued this year, which may be her first.
Critical Review. W. Simpkin and R. Marshall, 5 series.
17 (1764): 307

24 February 1789

PG was paid £20 by publisher James Dodsley for her anonymous, epistolary novel Hartly House, Calcutta, published by June.
Dodsley, Robert. The Correspondence of Robert Dodsley 1733-1764. Editor Tierney, James E., Cambridge University Press, 1988.
561
Wollstonecraft, Mary. The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft. Editors Todd, Janet and Marilyn Butler, Pickering, 1989, 7 vols.
7: 111

1805

PG reported to the Royal Literary Fund her unsubduable aspiration . . . to perfect before she dies, a work that will evince, she has not lived in vain. She had such a work on the stocks, but seems not to have finished it.
Archives of the Royal Literary Fund, 1790-1918.

Some time before 8 May 1822

PG must have died some time before (perhaps long before) this date, on which her death is first explicitly mentioned.
The Phebe Gibbs who was buried at Marylebone, London, on 14 August 1805 was probably the little girl of this name who was born there twenty-one months earlier.
Hopkinson, David. Emails to Jennie Batchelor and Isobel Grundy about Phebe Gibbes. 24 Mar. 2015.
Hopkinson, David. Emails to Jennie Batchelor and Isobel Grundy about Phebe Gibbes. 24 Mar. 2015.

Biography

The date and place of birth of Phebe French (later PG ) are uncertain. The information below is likely, not certain

18 March 1736

PG may have been the Phebe French born on this day in Peartree Alley in Shoreditch to Martha and Anthony French. But she may instead have been born to Sarah and Thomas French of Edge Hill in Warwickshire, close to where she was living in 1761.
Ancestry.co.uk. http://www.ancestry.co.uk.

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