The Children of the Abbey

Roche (1764-1845) is considered today a minor Gothic novelist who wrote in the shadow of Ann Radcliffe, but in her own day she was a bestselling author whose third novel The Children of the Abbey, published in four volumes in 1796, rivalled Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho. It went through several editions and was translated into French and Spanish. She was born in Waterford in Ireland, moving to Dublin as a child and then to England after her marriage in 1794. Her first two novels were published under her maiden name of Dalton, but it was her next two works, The Children of the Abbey and Clermont (1798), that brought her recognition. After the publication of her fifth novel she fell into financial difficulties thanks to a duplicitous solicitor and did not write again until 1807 when she received aid from the Royal Literary Fund. She wrote 11 further novels, most set in the rural Ireland she returned to in the 1820s, but none matched her earlier successes and she died in relative obscurity in the town of her birth. Reprinted from an American edition of 1880 with a frontispiece.