For Mother’s Day several years ago, I wrote about the common Gothic trope of absent mothers, which many authors use to turn their protagonists into vulnerable orphans and deny them the comfort and sense of safety that mothers provide. But just because mothers are often absent in their fiction, doesn’t mean that mothers have been absent from these authors’ real lives. In fact, several authors of Gothic fiction owe much of their literary career to the influence of their mothers. This Mother’s Day, I want to highlight two of my favorite literary moms: Mary Wollestonecraft and Lady Jane Wilde. Continue reading Influential Mothers of Gothic Authors