This paper discusses early nineteenth-century authorship through an analysis of transgressive, double and fragmented monsters in Gothic novels and tales. Relying on the concept of ‘figures of the author’, I read monsters such as the vampire, the doppelganger and the cyborg as Gothic refigurations of Romantic authorship. In analysing Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Ligeia’ (1838) and ‘The Man that Was Used Up’ (1839), I examine how the characteristic othering of bodies, such as occurs in the Gothic monster, comes to be representative of the dangers that Gothic writing, in its monstrous and mechanical popularity, posed to the dominant idea of the Romantic author and its features such as individuality, originality and organic totality.