Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Phebe Gibbes
-
Standard Name: Gibbes, Phebe
Birth Name: Phebe French
Married Name: Phebe Gibbes
Pseudonym: Mrs Lucius Phillips
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.
Jane Oakwood says (presumably standing in for her author, as she often does) that in youth she was accused of imitating Juliet, Lady Catesby (Frances Brooke
's translation from Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni
).
Olivia was fairly favourably noticed by the Critical Review in December 1786: more, however, for the introduction and professed intention than for the commonplace story.
The anonymous epistolary novel The History of Eliza Musgrove, published by June 1769, is ascribed to AW
in some sources; but Phebe Gibbes
claimed it as her own work in a letter to the...
Textual Production
Elizabeth Inchbald
A contemporary note in the Harvard
copy of The History of Miss Sommerville, published anonymously (as a Lady) in 1769, erroneously attributes it to Mrs Inchbauld. This, however, is too early a...