Clarke, Stewart (4 March 2019). "British Dramas 'Call the Midwife, 'Endeavour,' 'Vera' Get New Seasons". Variety . Retrieved 5 March 2019.

Furness, Hannah (11 July 2014). "BBC should have 'stopped Call the Midwife at the end of last series' ". The Telegraph. Archived from the original on 13 July 2014 . Retrieved 9 February 2020. Additionally, when Worth wants to make a moral point, she tends to ruin it by showing and then also telling, in very didactic terms. The story of her changing attitude toward religion is also predictable, superficial, and ultimately unsatisfying. Jenny" 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. [2] 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. [4]A frank and unsentimental view of the conditions of the East End in 1950s London. Conditions were deplorable with overcrowding, poverty and large families with women producing more children each year. This was all before the Pill and other forms of contraception. Attitudes too were very closely aligned to gender and what was considered women’s work and what was men’s work. Rarely did those lines cross or even blur.

It is that innate ability flowing forth, to communicate with such graphic, vivid, convincing, and compelling reality; which has firmly grasped, held, and enraptured this grateful reader. Jennifer Worth’s (neé Lee) practical and strongly empathetic observations left me unsurprised to learn that from 1973 she had pursued a successful second career in music. By comparison, fiction as a genre rarely achieves the same realism: with, I feel, the notable exception of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord Of The Rings” – but then to achieve what he did, Tolkien had to create an entire fictional mythology; an absolutely stupendous amount of work!Call the Midwife is based on the memoirs of Jennifer Worth (known in the show as Jenny Lee), featuring narration – and an on-screen appearance in the 2014 Christmas Special – by Vanessa Redgrave as an older Jenny. In this book we have a man, a sea captain who not only commits incest but prostitutes his daughter to dozens of men on a daily basis, bloody abortion, infanticide, bigamy, bullying and a nun with a major mental health issue. Working side–by–side among the sisters, Worth soon learns that they, too, possess compelling histories. Sister Monica Joan is a mischievous and slightly dotty octogenarian when Worth meets her at Nonnatus House but in her youth, the sister defied her aristocratic family to become a nun and midwife, eventually delivering thousands of babies in London through the worst bombings of the Blitz. However, it is Sister Evangelina who most surprises Worth. After accompanying the abrupt and seemingly humorless nun on her rounds, Worth discovers that the sister is a war heroine who is beloved by her patients for her scatological tales and ability to emit a fart of Chaucerian proportions. Wise and saintly Sister Julienne is the stability of the convent, and clever Sister Bernadette is the perfect midwife.

Jennifer Worth's third book about her years serving as a midwife in London's East End in the 1950s was much darker than the first two. It was well-written and the stories were all compelling, but it covered some serious stuff, including babies who died during delivery, botched abortions, children killed by tuberculosis, a father who prostituted his daughter on a ship, and the Contagious Diseases Acts. Essays about how devastating tuberculosis really is in an wonderful intergenerational story. It has a focus on the tragic impact of poverty. It shows the kafkaësk situations that lead to devastation. It did get a bit preachy and religious towards the very end, but I should have expected that since Jenny lived in a convent with a bunch of nuns.

READERS GUIDE

In God's mercy, I met an allergy specialist, a man of eighty-four, who took pity on me and guided me through an elimination diet. Within three months the eczema had cleared. Every new birth was my favorite experience, just the joy, the thrill, the privilege of bringing a new life into the world. I’ve had hundreds of “favorite experiences.” What a wonderful life.