I know that Susan Rose isn’t real, but I can’t stop thinking about her.

Maybe it’s because I know that people like her did exist, mostly long ago, and likely had similarly poignant experiences. But probably it’s because Susan’s creator, Erica Eisdorfer, has crafted such a compelling story in her debut novel, “The Wet Nurse’s Tale”, (available from Random House in August.

Susan Rose is indeed a wet nurse, living dirt-poor in Victorian England. And how does one become a wet nurse? Well, she must have had a child, obviously. And where is the child while the wet nurse feeds rich women’s children? Exactly…

Eisdorfer introduces us to a profession and the world surrounding it that has not been popularly novelized. Susan Rose is a refreshing heroine. She’s uneducated but uncannily wise, lower-class but willful, not traditionally pretty (she’s often described as large, coarse, and rough) but irresistible to many men—sometimes for reasons that highlight the stark class lines and societal roles of the time.

Susan’s journey takes her away from an abusive father, offers her a chance at true love, and shows the inhumanly iron will of a mother determined to be reunited with a lost child.

Oh, yes—there are lost children. It is easy to forget how commonly mothers and babies used to die in childbirth. Susan Rose knows loss (and so does the reader, experiencing it with her), and when her beloved (and very much alive) son is taken from her, her unflagging, desperate search for him will absolutely make you weep. And yet the end of her search is so unexpectedly satisfying. I think I might have actually cheered out loud a little bit.

I had the chance to interview Eisdorfer, who despite her ability to authentically capture a British voice, lives in Carrboro, N.C., where she manages the Bull’s Head Bookshop. She lives with her husband and two daughters, both of whom she nursed into their toddlerhood.

How did she capture Susan’s Victorian and British voice? “I’ve been a great reader all my life,” she says. “I’m a great Anglophile, I’m a sucker for all that stuff. I don’t know, it was just in me. …You know how you feel like you were born in the wrong time and place? I felt like a peasant woman with a bunch of kids hanging off my skirts.”

Finding Susan’s blend of subservience and awareness was not difficult, she adds—her experience working at a university trade bookstore has somewhat prepared her.

“My clientele are professors who require their crusts cut just so,” she says. “I would never say I was a servant, but I feel like I could get into that mindset. I felt I understood what it meant to bend oneself to one’s betters…When you’re very educated and of the upper class, sometimes it’s hard to realize how smart your lesser are. I’ve always liked that and have been intrigued by that idea.”

Scattered throughout the book are quick, first-person narratives from various women explaining why they chose to employ a wet nurse—for some women, it was beneath their station (as decided by their husbands); for others, it was a temporary fix as they helped their husbands with the last of the harvest. Eisdorfer says those sections were in part inspired by a friend of hers who had wanted to breastfeed her twins, but couldn’t.

“My friend with the twins wanted so much to nurse them, but she had no support,” she says. “Her whole family was against it; she was run ragged. I knew to her it felt like a real surrender to something. She knew she had to say no…I hated for her to feel as if she had done something wrong.”

As a breastfeeding mother, I acutely felt the turmoil Susan Rose experienced, and told Eisdorfer so. She admitted to her own sensitivity—while practicing for a book reading, “I was just reading it to one of my kids and I was crying and she was rolling her eyes,” she laughs.

Researching Susan’s life revealed the dark, miserable and just plain dirty aspects of history. “When I was a younger woman, I read all of this happy, singing peasant bullshit,” she says. “Then I began to realize, that’s bullshit!”

She had to “parse out the truth” of what life would have been like for Susan. The world of the wet nurse was enticing: as a servant living upstairs, surely she’d be “privy to all the secrets.” Yet Eisdorfer seems to have a corner on the market of the wet nurse in fiction.

“Women’s work was not as important as men’s work, so who wanted to write about it? It’s all that could mean,” she says of the dearth of novels and scholarship on wet nursing. “I look at it in a feminist way. It’s been ignored because it’s woman’s work, and it has to do with the body, and with the bosom. The breast—what we’ve done to the poor breast!”

Those are wise words. Susan Rose might have said them, too.