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 HartlyHouse, 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 Missionary: 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.