Who is Mum from The Silver Kiss and what is their importance?

Anne Sutcliff is the wife to Harry Sutcliff, and mother to Zoe Sutcliff, who is a painter living with her family in Oakwood, North America. Before the start of the novel, Anne is taken into hospital to receive another 'treatment' for her cancer, and despite Zoe's hopes does not return home during the time period of this book.

Anne Sutcliff can be seen as a backdrop to which the whole rest of the story happens in front of, she is in many ways a metaphor and a character as her struggle with her illness encapsulates what all of the other characters are struggling with: the possibility of death. The particular illness, cancer, that she is dealing with is similar to the vampirism of the anti-hero Simon and Christopher, and in a sense the external events that Zoe is dealing with can be seen as a metaphor for the greater drama of the battle against cancer and dignity.

She appears as a humorous and kind woman to her daughter and her husband and through the author dropping hints that she was a passionate, lively painter, and that she would like to be reincarnated as a cat, we see in her just how the disease has drained her of all the many joyful and dynamic things that she used to enjoy. Anne represents too, the words of wisdom for her daughter in the book, who consults with her on a couple of occasions about her own feelings of loss and bereavement.

Towards the end of the novel, Anne Sutcliff confides that she herself did want her daughter to see her so ill, and even is not scared of death any more. Her nobility and dignity can be seen in a moral light as the answers to the inevitability of death.