During the Victorian era, women who became mothers faced unprecedented, unrealistic, and even contradictory expectations from mainstream society. In Suffering Mothers in Mid-Victorian Novels, Natalie McKnight analyzes the influence of cultural pressures on the fictional portrayals of mothers in the mid-Victorian time using a new historical and psychoanalytic approach. The novels of Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, Thackeray, and George Eliot are studied for their inclusion of mother characters who vary from the ambivalent to the monstrous, the angelic to the absent. McKnight reveals the influences and natures of characters who function more critically in mid-Victorian fiction than has previously been supposed.