The Children of the Abbey as a Hybrid Text Regina Maria Roche’s 1796 The Children of the Abbey is a text that crosses the boundaries of genre: it at once engages with the conventions of the Gothic novel, the pedagogical text, the national tale, the novel of Sensibility, and travel literature. As an Irish-born British woman writing this novel during the politically volatile 1790s, Roche’s historical and temporal location may provide an explanation for her development of this hybrid novel. In its