One can conjecture that she spent part of her life in British India, as some of her novels, particularly Hartly House, avow a markedly accurate knowledge of Indian lifestyle as perceived through contemporary records.
Gibbes first entered the world of English literature with a double-debut in 1764: the controversial The Life and Adventures of Mr. Francis Clive (1764) and the epistolary novel, History of Lady Louisa Stroud, and the Honorable Miss Caroline Stretton (1764).
The Critical Review wrote positively of Miss Eliza Musgrove, citing Gibbes' novel as "equal in genius to Lennox, Brookes, and Scott.
Several contemporary issues surface multiple times in Gibbes' writing: child neglect, lack of female education, acquisitiveness, gambling, and personal vanity.
"[13] William Enfield, a well-regarded Unitarian minister and writer, however, applauded her novel as having, One must also note as particularly feministic, the accidentally bigamous marriage of Elfrida, in the eponymous novel Elfrida, and the incredible death of Hannah, the household servant in Mr. Francis Clive, who suffers a painful and protracted demise after imbibing a faulty abortifacient (abortion-inducing poultice) from an apothecary when she becomes pregnant with Clive's child.
[15] These kinds of outrageous, yet plausible, situations left Gibbes’ novels as somewhat polemic in the time period; and, clearly, it is hardly precocious to call her an early feminist.