Goodreads asked Janet Benton:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Janet Benton I was a professional writer and editor with too little time for writing fiction when I had my only baby. For months, nursing around the clock was my chief occupation. In that foggy time, my husband showed me a review of The History of the European Family. I learned there and in further reading of how common "illegitimate births" were, and how, for most of the infants born to an unwed girl or woman, the cost of prejudice was separation from their mothers and death.

As a new mother, I knew that women forced by social hatred to give up their infants must have suffered greatly, and I was haunted by the sad fates of their infants, unable to survive without a mother’s milk. Lilli de Jong, which is set in Philadelphia in 1883, began when the words of an unwed mother started coming into my head.

Abandoned by her lover, Lilli had to give her baby to a woman nursing multiple infants to become a servant in a wealthy home, nursing that family’s newborn. Could she save up enough to lease a sewing machine and rent a room, so she could reclaim her baby? Would her baby survive till then? What would be the relationship between the two mothers—the wealthy one who didn’t nurse her newborn, and the social pariah she’d hired to do so?

I had to fit the research and writing into a life crammed with motherhood and paying work. This was difficult, but the novel probably contains more layers of understanding and information as a result of all the years it took—things I wouldn’t have learned or found out if I’d written it more quickly. Since I live near the settings in which the novel occurs, I was able to visit many historical societies, sites, and neighborhoods, attend lectures and events, speak with experts, and examine documents from institutions that helped the poor.

I’m grateful that others will have the chance to read Lilli’s story and to consider the plights of single mothers and their children, in the past and in our own day.

flag