The ideal mother is the ghost that haunts the Victorian novel. Paradoxically, the world of Victorian fiction, so preoccupied with women's power in the context of the domestic sphere, only rarely embodies that power in the figure of a mother. Instead, Victorian novels almost invariably feature protagonists whose mothers are dead or lost, swept away by menacing and often mysterious outside forces. The maternal ideal in fiction thus takes its shape and its power in the context of almost complete maternal absence, and I would argue, through the necessary vehicle of such a void. This is a book about representations of the loss of the mother, about the ambivalent compensatory structures that emerge in the wake of her departure, and finally, about the revealing disruption of those structures at the inevitable point at which the repressed returns.

The mid-nineteenth century is a period in which narrative fictions and rhetorics of the maternal ideal flourish side by side. It is surely noteworthy, then, that the maternal ideal within narrative fictions is a rule honored more often in the breach: the predominant domestic topos in the Victorian novel is a family represented in terms of maternal death or desertion. The mother's absence creates a mystery for her child to solve, motivating time and again the redefinition – in the absence of role-models – of female decorum, gender roles, and sexuality.