Breastfeeding in literature

[teff]

Can anyone think of any fiction that includes descriptions of breastfeeding? I recently read a story by Helen Simpson which had a lovely passage about nursing. The only other examples I can think of are a Maupassant story where a women breastfeeds a starving soldier and a sci-fi(?) story where a woman poisons someone using her breast milk. These aren't really the kind of thing I'm looking for; I'd like to read about breastfeeding as a normal part of life.

Thanks

Why are you looking? [nosy emoticon]

Not literature but for kids books DD (16mo) loves looking at Janet & Alan Ahlberg baby catalogue because some of the babies there are bf. She points and says milk whereas the bottlefed ones she says drinkie.

Had to come back to this thread because I had a feeling that there might be something in Rabelais, and I've found it. It's one for anyone who felt their baby was too big to breastfeed

After the account of how Gargantua is born through his mother's left ear, we are told:

'And they ordered for him seventeen thousand nine hundred and thirteen cows from Pintille and Brehemont for his everyday supplies of milk. For it was impossible to find a nurse to satisfy him anywhere in the country, considering the great quantity of nourishment that he required. Certain Scotist doctors have nevertheless affirmed that his mother suckled him and that she could draw from her breasts fourteen hundred and two pipes and nine pails of milk at a time. But this is improbable and has been declared mammalianly scandalous, offensive to pious ears, and distantly redolent of heresy.'

I Capture The Castle FAB book.

Never get tired of reading it - maybe 100+ times so far?

There are some lovely ideas, thank you all. Forever Optimistic;I'm breastfeeding my DS and it was just so nice to read Simpson's description that it made me want to read more. I quite like to have a bit of structure to what I'm reading so it seems a good theme to pursue.

David Copperfield - The Micawber twins. Always attached, and they say you can't successfully BF twins. Amazing they survived in the past.

This is a bit from Helen Simpson's story Heavy Weather. The character's feeding her baby at 4am.

"He was huffing with eagerness and scrabbled crazily at her breasts like a drowning man until she lay down with him. A few seconds more and he had abandoned himself to rhythmic gulping. She stroked his soft head and drifted off."

Lark Rise to Candleford by Flora Thompson

The young Laura describes watching a woman breastfeeding in church..

"[It was interesting]... to see Clerk Tom's young wife suckling her baby. She wore a fur tippet in winter and her breast hung like a white heather bell between the soft blackness until it was covered up with a white handkerchief 'for modesty'".

A Wet-nurse is sent for at the beginning of 'Gormenghast' too.