This book deals with the trials and errors of Romantic-period mothers, the politicizing of maternal bodies and the maternalizing of political bodies, and the authoring of mothers and the mothering of texts. In the chapters to follow, I identify abstract theories and material practices associated with motherhood during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and consider especially ways these were negotiated discursively by writers attempting to make legible the seemingly self-disclosing, but often highly mysterious maternal body. My primary concern is to trace ways that writers deployed representations of mother–child bonds as a means to naturalize various constructions of interpersonal and intercultural relations, but I also want to consider some of the fault lines between writing motherhood and reading the bodies of mothers, between books about birth and the birthing of books. I view Romantic writers' treatments of motherhood and maternal bodies especially through the lens of the legal, medical, educational, and socioeconomic debates about motherhood so popular during the period, discussions that rendered the physical processes associated with mothering matters of national importance.