Hartly House, Calcutta

by Phebe Gibbes, Michael J. Franklin (Editor)

Written at the time of the Warren Hastings impeachment and set in the period of Hastings's Orientalist government of India, Hartly House, Calcutta (1789) is a dramatic representation of the Anglo-Indian encounter. The novel about India was developed by women writers and Phebe Gibbes's Hartly
House, Calcutta is the first important example of this fascinating sub-genre which includes Elizabeth Hamilton's Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (1796), and Lady Morgan's (Sydney Owenson's) The An Indian Tale (1811).

This novel represents a key document in the literary representation of India and the imperial debate, profoundly challenging pre-existent discourses of colonialism. Beyond offering a radical feminization of India, it introduced an assimilable and sentimentalized version of the Indological
scholarship which facilitated Romantic Orientalism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and which is currently subject to revisionary analysis by students and critics of postcolonialism and gender studies. From the standpoints of both materialist feminist scholarship and
postcolonial theory, Hartly House, Calcutta illustrates the intricate relationships between mercantile capitalism, colonial trade, issues of race, religion, and class, national identity, and British constructions of gender within the colony and the metropolis.

Genres: Classics

222 pages, Hardcover

First published November 15, 2007

About the author

Phebe Gibbes (died 1805) 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).

Source: Wikipedia

Reviews

[Bree Pye · Rating 2 out of 5]

Read for a Romantic Women Writers graduate seminar at CU Boulder.

I have to say - one of the more boring 18th century reads I've endured in the process of chasing higher education. While the glimpse of the life and culture of Calcutta are interesting, the explanatory notes for the novel indicate that much of Gibbes' knowledge of India and history were secondhand and perhaps even directly plagiarized. That said - were this nonfiction, I'd probably give it more of a nod - but as it is fiction, and as nearly NOTHING happens the ENTIRE novel - I have to caution against potentially boring yourself to DEATH by reading it through.

[Clara Helm · Rating 3 out of 5]

Another colonial fiction, this time surrounding the wealth and excess of British nabobs in India. I was very aware that it was an epistolary novel the whole time (negative) and the descriptions got a bit tiresome. But some interesting criticism on the role of sensibility in exploitation, but did not criticize the actual nature of exploitation.