Jennifer Louise WorthRNRM was a British memoirist. She wrote a best-selling trilogy about her work as a nurse and midwife practicing in the poverty-stricken East End of London in the 1950s: Call the Midwife, Shadows of the Workhouse and Farewell to The East End. A television series, Call the Midwife, based on her books, began broadcasting on BBC One on 15 January 2012. After leaving nursing, she re-trained as a musician.
Biography
Jennifer Louise Lee was born in Clacton-on-Sea, Essex, on 25 September 1935, to Gordon and Elsie Lee. Worth was raised in Amersham, Buckinghamshire. She had a younger sister, Christine, and two younger paternal half-sisters. After leaving school at the age of 15 she learned shorthand and typing and became the secretary to the head of Dr Challoner's Grammar School. She then trained as a nurse at the Royal Berkshire Hospital, Reading, and moved to London to receive training to become a midwife. Lee was hired as a staff nurse at the London Hospital in Whitechapel in the 1950s. With the Sisters of St John the Divine, an Anglican community of nuns, she worked to aid the poor. She was then a ward sister at the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital in Bloomsbury. She left midwifery to work in palliative care at the Marie Curie Hospice in Hampstead. She had a brief relationship with an architect named Alec, during their relationship however he died after falling from a staircase. She married the artist Philip Worth in 1963, and they had two daughters. Worth left nursing in 1973 to pursue her musical interests. In 1974, she was appointed a licentiate of the London College of Music, where she taught piano and singing. She obtained a fellowship in 1984. She performed as a soloist and with choirs throughout Britain and Europe. Many years later she began writing, and her first volume of memoirs, Call the Midwife, was published in 2002. The book became a best-seller when it was reissued in 2007. Shadows of the Workhouse and Farewell to the East End also became best-sellers. The trilogy sold almost a million copies in the UK alone. In a fourth volume of memoirs, In the Midst of Life, published in 2010, Worth reflects on her later experiences caring for the terminally ill.
Activism
Worth was highly critical of Mike Leigh's 2004 filmVera Drake, for depicting the consequences of illegal abortions unrealistically. She argued that the method shown in the movie, far from being fairly quick and painless, was in fact almost invariably fatal for the woman. As a result of the harm done with such illegal procedures, she approved of the legalization of abortion in the UK, saying this was a medical, not moral, issue.
Death
Worth died on 31 May 2011, having been diagnosed with cancer of the oesophagus earlier in the year. The first episode of the television series Call the Midwife, based on her experiences in Poplar, London, in the late 1950s, was dedicated to her.
