![]() ![]() The book is more about the texture of Dora's life than plot, and McKay handles the proceedings with winning, unsentimental care. ![]() Gradually Dora becomes the guardian of age-old female knowledge under threat from modern technology. Issues of women’s rights and freedoms are never far from the novel’s surface. Period advertisments, journal entries and letters to and from various characters give Dora's voice context. McKay sets The Birth House against the historical backdrop of war, influenza, the Halifax Explosion, and the Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919. ![]() A difficult marriage, many difficult births, a patient's baby thrust on her to raise without warning and other crises (including WWI and the introduction of "clinical" birthing methods) ensue. After initial reluctance and increasingly intensive training, 17-year-old Dora moves in with Marie on the eve of Dora's marriage to Archer Bigelow, Marie disappears, leaving Dora her practice. ), who claims to have marked Dora out from birth as her successor. McKay writes in the voice of shipbuilder's daughter, Dora Rare, "the only daughter in five generations of Rares," who as a girl befriends the elderly and estranged Marie Babineau, long the local midwife (or traiteur Canadian radiojournalist McKay was unable to ferret out the life story of late midwife Rebecca Steele, who operated a Nova Scotia birthing center out of McKay's Bay of Fundy house in the early 20th century the result of her unsatisfied curiousity is this debut novel. ![]()
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