Phebe Gibbes is among the earliest writers to set the traditional notion of identity formed through ancestry and culture against an emerging awareness of psychological subjectivity. She published at least 14 novels that gesture ahead to both the sharp irony of Jane Austen and the psychological complexity of Mary Shelley. Gibbes claims to have authored 22 novels between 1764 and 1790, yet in only one does Gibbes identify herself as “Mrs. P Gibbes” (Franklin, Michael, Hartly House, Calcutta, edited by Michael Franklin, xi–lvi. Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2019). The little known about her life has been gleaned from scant biographical details recorded in her 1804 financial aid application to the Royal Literary Fund: she was a widow and mother of three, the family’s poverty apparently due to her father-in-law’s gambling addiction, a prevalent theme in her novels. Her only son went to India and never returned, scholars speculating that Gibbes herself may have spent time in India based on her later novels’ detailed representation of Indian culture, topography, and philosophy. Commonalities among Gibbes’s novels have helped support claims to her authorship, including ironic juxtapositions; meta-fictional narrative layering; ubiquitous allusions to English poetry; and nuanced tonality in challenging “Della Cruscan” sentimentality. While throughout her career Gibbes represents such social and political concerns as child neglect, class inequities, and the rights of women, the later novels focus on the relationship among gender, immigration, and xenophobia during the pivotal period of English colonialism and the late British Enlightenment.