Hubert de Sevrac, a Romance of the Eighteenth Century (1796) is a Gothic novel by the celebrity actress and poet Mary Robinson.

Hubert de Sevrac was influenced by the Gothic novels of Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Smith, and William Godwin, but it was not as well received and marked the beginning of Robinson's decline in popularity as a novelist.

Robinson began a prolific writing career in 1788, as a new source of money and fame after the conclusion of her notorious affairs with the Prince of Wales and Banastre Tarleton.

This identity theft leads to his death, as Ravillon is murdered by a Frenchman who mistakenly believes Hubert is responsible for the crimes of the cruel Count de Briancour.

Hubert de Sevrac is a strongly pro-revolutionary novel, taking radical stances at a time when the French Revolution was increasingly disapproved of in England.

[4] Hubert concludes that his former life as an aristocrat made him comfortable at the expense of others' suffering; his daughter, Sabina, discovers that she has been overly trusting of her Catholic confessor, exposing her predilection toward irrational superstition.

[5] The culmination of the novel's bildungsroman is Hubert de Sevrac's rejection of the elitist ancien régime and his embrace of virtuous family life as an expatriate.

[4] Robinson herself also promoted the value of chivalry in her 1791 pamphlet Impartial Reflections on the Present Situation of the Queen of France, in which she urged revolutionaries to protect Marie Antionette.

[4] However, Hubert de Sevrac post-dates the 1793 execution of Marie Antoinette, and in the novel Robinson now critiques chivalry by presenting it as primarily a form of one-upmanship between men, which fails to accomplish its claimed social protection of vulnerable women.

[4] The character of Sabina defies several of the conventional tropes of a Gothic heroine, promoting an ideal of womanhood that values intelligence and knowledge over modesty and chastity.

Emily draws on her experience with the world, and especially with untrustworthy men, to help Sabina escape sexually-threatening situations that other Gothic novels would conventionally resolve through lucky coincidences.

The novel opens with the de Sevrac family forced to flee Paris, which could be in response to the Insurrection of 10 August 1792 or the subsequent September Massacres, but the inciting event is never specified.

Anna Laetitia Barbauld, for example, complained about the popularity of fiction featuring "ghosts and goblins, or murders, earthquakes, fires, shipwrecks, and all the most terrible disasters attending human life".

[4] Hubert also quotes from Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-88), specifically endorsing its scepticism of institutional Christianity.

[10] The scholar Anne Close describes Hugo de Sevrac as "one of Robinson's most self-conscious attempts to earn money by satisfying readers' appetites for Gothic fiction".

[11] These reviews did not discuss the novel's political themes or its connection to real-life events, implicitly dismissing it as an unrealistic fantasy despite its contemporary setting.