Hartly House, Calcutta

by Phebe Gibbes (Editor), Michael J. Franklin (Editor)

This novel is a designedly political document. Written at the time of the Hastings impeachment and set in the period of Hastings’s Orientalist government, Hartly House, Calcutta (1789) represents a dramatic delineation of the Anglo-Indian encounter. The novel constitutes a significant intervention in the contemporary debate concerning the nature of Hastings’s rule of India by demonstrating that it was characterised by an atmosphere of intellectual sympathy and racial tolerance. Within a few decades the Evangelical and Anglicising lobbies frequently condemned Brahmans as devious beneficiaries of a parasitic priestcraft, but Phebe Gibbes’s portrayal of Sophia’s Brahman and the religion he espouses represent a perception of India dignified by a sympathetic and tolerant attempt to dispel prejudice.

Genres: Classics

272 pages, Paperback

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.