I’m not sure if I’m reading your question correctly. Are you asking about the complications given in the novel? If so:
1)Her first labor was “hard and dry.” Well, a labor can certainly be long and hard, particularly a first labor. There is actually no such thing as a “dry” labor. This term refers to a labor in which the amniotic sac ruptures early on, even before the onset of labor. Having the bag of waters intact does provide a benefit to the baby in that it probably cushions him during the contractions and certainly keeps him safe from infection, which is why rupturing them prematurely is generally not a good idea. A baby born with a caul (with the bag still around his face) was considered to have good luck. However, the mother’s body continues to produce amniotic fluid throught labor, so she never actually goes “dry.”
As to the difficulty of this fictional labor, I couldn’t really say. Was the character in actual hard labor for 3 days? It’s not uncommon for a woman to experience mild or intermittent contractions for several days, but not to have full-blown labor for that long. Was she confined to bed? It was less common in 1900, though that was the beginning of the time that doctor’s started taking over from midwives. With doctors came confinement to bed, laboring with the feet in stirrups, and other things that made labor more difficult. In the 1950s it was much more common for women to be anesthetized to the point that they could not deliver their babies themselves.
2)Her second birth happened at the “advanced age” of 45: Well, I’m not sure how uncommon it was then for women to have children while in their 40s. My grandmother, born in 1900, had 9 children (7 of whom survived infancy), the last when she was 42. Birth control, (disregarding for the moment that the character in question was Catholic,) was much more an option in the 1950s than in 1910. That would seem to be a bias of the author’s time period.
Beadalin, the sideways presentation you describe is often referred to as “transverse.” As you found with your niece, if the baby cannot be turned, it must be taken by c-section.