This is the real life story, published in 2002, that inspired the BBC/PBS series "Call the Midwife."
Jennifer Lee was born in Essex in 1935 and raised in Amersham, Buckinghamshire. She left school in 1949, took a course in shorthand and typing, and got her first job as a secretary in a grammar school. She then trained as a nurse at the Royal Berkshire Hospital, Reading, and moved to London to train as a midwife.
Lee was hired as a staff nurse at the London Hospital in Whitechapel in London's East End in the early 1950s. With the Sisters of St John the Divine, an Anglican community of nuns, she worked among the poor during the social upheavals on the postwar years. She was then a nurse at the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital in Bloomsbury, and later at the Marie Curie Hospital in Hampstead.
In 1963 she married Philip Worth, an artist. She had two daughters, and continued to work as a nurse until 1973. In 1974, she began teaching piano and singing at the London College of Music. She obtained a college fellowship in 1984. She performed as a soloist and with choirs throughout Britain and Europe. She retained her interest, however, in her former profession of midwifery. In 1998 an article by Terri Coates, lamenting the general lack of knowledge about the history and practice of midwifery, was published in the Midwives Journal. Inspired and challenged by Coates' article, Worth decided to write about her own experiences.
Her first book, Call the Midwife, was published in 2002, followed by Shadows of the Workhouse in 2005, and Farewell to the East End in 2009. All three books became best sellers in Great Britain. Worth published a fourth volume of memoirs, In the Midst of Life, recalling her later experiences as a nurse caring for terminally ill patients, in 2010.
Worth lived in Hertfordshire until her death from cancer in 2011. She is survived by her husband, daughters, and two granddaughters. The BBC began broadcasting the series, "Call the Midwife," based on her memoirs, in January 2012. The series was rebroadcast on PBS in America later that same year. Responding to popular and critical acclaim, a second series followed in 2013.
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| Author Jennifer Worth |
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