Historical Fiction | Race & Identity | Women’s Stories | 1930s America
Date Published: September 19, 2025
Publisher: MindStir Media
Pamela appears to be a privileged young white socialite, newly married and expecting her first child. But beneath the polished surface lies a restless, unsettled woman struggling against the suffocating expectations placed upon her. As her pregnancy advances, Pamela becomes fixated on one thing: finding Miss Minnie, the Black midwife who delivered her at home in 1911.
Her request ignites fierce resistance. Both families condemn the idea, and Pamela’s husband, Frank, fearing scandal and loss of control, tightens his grip—bringing in relatives to monitor her movements and even hiring surveillance to ensure she never makes contact with the midwife. Determined and increasingly reckless, Pamela secretly pressures her Black maid to help locate Miss Minnie, setting in motion a chain of events neither family can contain.
What begins as a quiet domestic drama escalates into a volatile confrontation with race, power, and truth. As long-buried histories surface, the search for a midwife becomes a catalyst for racial tension, betrayal, and violence—raising the chilling question: will this birth end in life… or murder?
Long Lost Midwife starts with measured restraint and builds relentlessly toward a tempestuous, unforgettable conclusion. It is a haunting exploration of white blindness, Black resilience, and the fragile illusions that sustain privilege in early 20th-century America.
● Thought-provoking historical fiction
● Novels examining race, class, and gender
● Character-driven stories set in pre-Civil Rights America
● Books that begin quietly and end with devastating force
In St. Louis, Franklin and Pamela Dorset lived in a house of many rooms in the coveted Central West End neighborhood of the city. In 1932, at the time of their marriage, only wealthy white people owned homes there. Shortly after their honeymoon on the European continent, they moved into Fullerton’s Westminster Place, a tony subsection of the CWE. Grand and spacious, their home had three stories, six bedrooms and a prominent pointy-roofed turret.
Frank was twenty-six, his wife twenty-one. For their house, they paid a third of the cost. With only two years under his belt as an attorney in his father’s firm, Frank paid his and his wife’s third with the bulk of his wedding present. His parents paid a third as did hers. Née Lucas, Pamela put her wedding monies into escrow for future household expenses.
During the final ten years of a professional career, Smith moderated the Plymouth Writers Group, a MeetUp-based genre writing collective composed of engineers, doctors, legal professionals, technical writers, and MFA graduates. Within this collaborative environment, Smith completed first drafts of three novels, with two additional works developed independently.
Smith holds a degree in History from St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota, an academic foundation that profoundly shapes the thematic and contextual grounding of the work. Historical setting, for Smith, is never decorative—it is the backbone of character behavior and moral conflict.
Another significant creative influence comes from many years singing in Sonomento, a Minneapolis-based operatic choir active until 2024. Immersion in opera introduced Smith to the disciplined exactness of musical phrasing and libretto, where text is fluid, expressive, and shaped by emotional register. That sense of linguistic “plasticity” carries directly into Smith’s prose style.
Long Lost Midwife reflects these influences in a novel that begins with restraint and builds toward controlled chaos—examining race, power, and identity in 1930s America with precision, tension, and historical depth.
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