Grandma Barksdale

Helen Morgendorffer's mother, who is never directly seen or heard from in the Daria series. Her presence, however, is felt from Erin's wedding onward ("I Don't"). It is implied that she is unable to travel, and also implied that she is well off enough financially to afford showering Rita and her daughter Erin with gifts and windfalls. (Glenn Eichler has said Helen didn't grow up in a wealthy household, but the show itself does show Barksdale with money)

Of her three daughters, she is closest to Rita Barksdale and appears to favor her over Helen and Amy. This spawned a long-running feud between the three sisters that is finally (one hopes) resolved in "Aunt Nauseam." Before then, Helen occasionally rants about the unfair treatment Rita gets, said rants being remarkably similar to her husband Jake Morgendorffer's rants against his father.

In fanon, it's assumed she paid for Brian Danielson to fly out to Switzerland to have a second honeymoon with Erin, saving their marriage ("Aunt Nauseum"): Brian didn't have a job to pay for it on his own, and she'd already sent Erin there.

Fanfiction

The character was expanded in numerous fanfics, with many divergent names.

C.E. Forman gave her an equally wealthy half-sister, Aunt Eleanor, and the same rivalry that Helen/Rita had with Amy and Quinn with Daria. Kara Wild named her Evelyn in the Driven Wild Universe and made her generally crusty, but loving. Later, Richard Lobinske would create Tess Barksdale, the southern matriarch in the fanfiction series, Falling Into College. Roentgen introduced a Bethany Barksdale for The Hallowed Halls of Fielding, a connected upper-class matriach, paying for Quinn & Daria's Fielding Prep education and ignoring Helen's authority in her attempts to mould Quinn into a 'proper' high society lady. The "punkverse" shared world has Edie Barksdale, a moderately wealthy woman from a 'good' family: Brian Taylor's 1980s-set Moving Pictures has badly coping after the death of her husband and having a disintegrating relationship with Amy and Helen; in Charles RB's "God Save The Esteem", she was cut off from seeing Daria early on and in the 00s, is trying to revive their relationship in an attempt to 'retrieve' the girl.