Hannah: A Midwife's Tale

R.G. Moyles is a professor of English at the University of Alberta and
the co-author of Imperial Dreams and Colonial Realities: British Views
of Canada, 1880–1914.

If you’re hankering for a Harlequin romance set in pre-Confederation
northern Newfoundland, look no further than Hannah. The back-cover blurb
suggests that this first-time novel about the “daring challenges” of
a local midwife in a “northern outport” centres on the customs and
the courage of these northern people. In fact, the mainstay of the novel
is romance. Our “tall, lithe, fair-haired” heroine meets a lonely
American doctor, a lover of poetry who is unencumbered with an absentee
wife. They deliver a baby together and spend time in a tilt, trapped by
a storm: “Outside in the night the world was a crystalline cathedral
of breathtaking beauty ... He returned to see Hannah running around from
the back of the tilt with the breathless air of excitement John loved
about her.” The minor inconvenience of a spouse is easily overcome
(death works wonders in such novels), and eventually the two soulmates
find connubial bliss.

Rather than being a natural underpinning to the story, Salter’s
depiction of Newfoundland culture and lifestyle seems a bit forced.
Hannah nevertheless should appeal to aficionados of the romance genre.