The present article is intended to contribute to the literary recovery of Julia Kavanagh – one of the forgotten women writers of the Victorian age –, through the exploration of the relationship between the maternal figure outlined in the novel Rachel Gray and its corresponding socio-historical template. By indicating that the literary representation of the mid-nineteenth-century (step)mother of the respectable working classes replicates the stereotype of the wicked stepmother, the paper proves that the former is not created in consistency with the prototypical portrait of mid-Victorian working-class (step)mothers. Thus, the recent invalidation of the widespread assumption that nineteenth-century realist fiction should be assessed according to how faithfully it reproduces things and people in the real world is confirmed and the negative reception of Julia Kavanagh’s novels based on this assumption is proved unfounded.