Jane's Cure

Trapped in a granite cell, a nineteenth century midwife tells her story as she awaits her trial for the crime of helping women time their pregnancies. Or is she guilty of something far worse?

Readers will fall in love with Jane Angier, the defiant midwife fighting for women's autonomy on the coastal borderlands between Maine and Canada, a smuggler's paradise where laws are ignored, but social rules are as restrictive as a whalebone corset.

Jane, a trapper's daughter, arrives in Queen's Bay when a boatload of Irish immigrants threatens the town with typhoid fever, the bottom has fallen out of the timber trade, and cheap rum is making everyone ugly. Jane inherits the role of midwife and develops an effective and popular cure for common female ills, drawing the ire of an incompetent doctor and the warm attention of his wife. When Jane intervenes in the pregnancy care of a disabled young girl, the community's powerful men unite to get her out of Queen's Bay, preferably at the end of a rope. This gripping novel brings to life the historic conflict over reproductive rights through the powerful voice of a woman you will not soon forget.