"A gripping historical mystery based on the real-life diary entries of Martha Ballard, an 18th-century midwife who found herself at the center of a murder trial."--
A biography based on the annual of Martha Ballard, housewife, midwife, healer, who lived in and around the Kennebec River towns of Hallowell and Augusta, Maine, gives a rare picture of ordinary life in preindustrial America.
The life of Martha Ballard, a frontier midwife in Maine, is reconstructed through her diary. She lived through the economic boom and bust, and political and social turmoil of the decades following the American Revolution.