Although the wet-nursing industry may have long faded into the past, the debate around breastfeeding remains a fascinating and salient subject in the twenty-first century. Indeed, while perusing the wealth of striking historical and literary examples offered up in this study, one cannot help but reflect on their connection with divisive issues in our own time. Lisa Algazi Marcus perceptively addresses a powerful political imaginary of the mothering body that continues to intensify bodily autonomy debates today — not only those most obviously implied by the subject of her study, concerning the use of formula milk and public breastfeeding, but also those around abortion and LGBTQ+ rights. This book, then, feels important and timely, and addresses a significant gap within nineteenth-century French studies. It begins with a thorough account of attitudes to breastfeeding in eighteenth-century France, including moving statistics on the prevalence of wet-nursing and the associated infant mortality rates despite the period’s abundance of idealistic discourse on the value of nursing one’s own child. This sets the stage for the second chapter to consider the reasons for a decline in portrayals of breastfeeding in the Romantic era, stressing the impact of Napoleon’s regressive attitudes towards women and his associated public policy. Algazi Marcus examines a very wide range of authors here: Gabriel Legouvé, Chateaubriand, Hugo, Alphonse de Lamartine and George Sand, alongside a selection of early nineteenth-century paintings. The final two chapters explore realist and naturalist authors’ renewed interest in both breastfeeding and the allegorical Republican figure of Marianne, moving between Balzac’s Mémoires de deux jeunes mariées (1841), Alexandre Hepp’s Le Lait d’une autre (1891), and Zola’s Fécondité (1899). Algazi Marcus’s primary interest in these chapters is in the curious proximity of the maternal and the sexual. Whereas in the eighteenth century it was acceptable to cite sensual pleasure as an incentive for women to nurse, she argues, after the relegation of the maternal breast to the private sphere under the Empire, discussion of such pleasure could only later return via the (often pathologizing) eroticization of mothers and wet-nurses by anxious male authors. The fourth chapter investigates, in particular, Hepp’s and Zola’s politicized deployment of characters named Marianne during the Third Republic. The fictional passages Algazi Marcus cites are always intriguing, and occasionally astonishing — helping to make this study a genuinely compelling read. They also provide fertile ground for her psychoanalytic readings, which propose that these authors’ own processes of subconscious desire and identification are what motivate their depictions of the mother–infant dyad. However, the discussion of psychoanalytic theory itself (Freud and Kristeva) in Chapter 3 feels too brief, and one might have expected a rationale for why other interpretive paradigms were left aside. In particular, given that this study is centrally concerned with the political uses of biological essentialism, a response to gender theory since Judith Butler would have been welcome, even if only to clarify the author’s chosen approach. Nevertheless, Algazi Marcus’s clear-sighted analysis and impressive range of sources ensure that this is valuable and thought-provoking research.