Endorsements

In this study, Kathryn S. Freeman positionsthe newly recovered, prolific English novelist, Phebe Gibbes,at thehistorical and ideological nexus of the "long eighteenth century." Through the Fiction of Phebe Gibbescontributes a valuable perspective to recent scholarship reshaping the traditional paradigm of the revolutionary era. The study persuasively demonstratesthat Gibbes fills a lacuna between thetraditionally polarized endpoints of this newer periodization,connecting writers such as Aphra Behn and Eliza Haywood to Jane Austen and Mary Wollstonecraft. Structured around detailed readings of five representative novels, the study seamlessly tracesGibbes'sevolving authorial voice. Freeman guides her reader through Gibbes'sgrowing sophistication in metanarrative, irony, and wordplay, tools through which Gibbes shapesnovels whose female characters strugglefor agencyamid Britain's increasing global empowerment and a shifting socio-political structure between the Seven Years' War and the French Revolution. Gibbespopulates her novels with a range of women whose agency subverts the generic marriage plot of the sentimental novel, including a prostitute and cross-dressing wife (Francis Clive);young women escapinga French conventdisguised as boys(TheAmerican Fugitive);a young Indian woman maintaining a powerful subjectivity in a xenophobic English village (Zoriada); and an inadvertent bigamist (Elfrida). The study returns to the legacy of women writers by linking Austen'sPersuasion to Elfrida through commonalitiesincluding female prodigality;patterns of wordplay such as sentimental and economic connotations of tenderness/tendering andfemale alienation; and the free indirect discourse through which both writers give the reader access to their heroine'sconsciousness.