To write a life, in the Victorian period, is to write the story of the loss of the mother. In fiction and biography, autobiography and poetry, the organizational logic of lived experience extends, not from the moment of birth, but from the instant of that primal loss. From Emma through To the Lighthouse, but most dramatically in the fiction of mid-Victorian Britain, stories of family and individual development, as well as narratives of mystery, intrigue, and desire, almost invariably occur in the immediate context of maternal death or desertion. The significance of maternal loss in the construction of subjectivity, domesticity, and desire, and the ideological implications of this representational practice, are the concerns of this book.

It is paradoxical that the predominant generic template of the nineteenth-century British novel blatantly undermines those ideologies of the family it is commonly thought to uphold. Structured principally not as a celebration of family unity, or even of the sanctity of the domestic sphere, the Victorian novel conventionally opens with a scene of family rupture, frequently a maternal deathbed or a tale of wanton maternal abandonment.